Wikia Gaming Launches With 250,000 Articles

I love Wikia – CEO Gil Penchina, a former eBay executive, says he works harder than anyone in Silicon Valley at building his startup. I routinely point out to him that his startup doesn’t actually do anything – their wiki software is based on the open source MediaWiki project, Google, Looksmart and FM Publishing handle all the revenue via ad sales, and their users create every drop of content on the site. All he has to do is make sure the lights stay on (to be fair, Wikia has made substantial contributions to MediaWiki).

Anyway, back to the news: Wikia is launching Wikia Gaming tonight, a collection of video game focused wikis. The sites contain over 250,000 articles on games already, on all major platforms. The World of Warcraft site is the largest single wiki, with 43,000 articles.

Wikia, which has raised $14 million from Bessemer and Amazon, claims a quarter billion monthly page views. 800,000 articles on 3,000 topics have been created and edited by over 200,000 registered users in 70 languages.