I’m not sure I want 2006 to end. It’s been a great year.
Here’s what happened:
January
I spent New Year with my family in England after spending my first Christmas away, with Tim in NSW. At the start of January, I visited Florida for the first time and spent a couple of weeks at the office Wikia and Wikimedia were sharing in St. Petersburg. This was when Wikia got its first round of investment. The news was leaked in February and announced in March (blog post). Tim and Kate temporarily joined Wikia’s technical team.
February
The $4m from Wikia’s first investment round allowed me to hire the first two Wikia Community Team members, sannse and Mindspillage, in February.
March
In March, I visited Austria for the Content for Competitiveness conference in Vienna. Back in Australia, I visited Perth for the first time and met Mark Ryan from Wikipedia and Tim’s sister. Wikicities rebranded as “Wikia” and finally announced the first round of investment.
April
I made another trip to the US in April for the very interesting Forum on Digital Transition in Santa Barbara. That was followed by the smallest Wikipedia meetup I’ve been to since only one other person (Antandrus) showed up! I was back in Australia for Easter and Tim’s birthday. KaurJmeb joined Wikia’s community team and John Q Smith joined Wikia’s technical team to lead ops, support, and development.
May
Tim visited England for the first in May. We stopped off for a two day trip to Hong Kong on the way.
My first nephew, Alex, was born in May whilst I was in England. The book I part-authored, Wikis: Tools for Information Work And Collaboration, was published in May. Back in Australia, we attempted to find a new place to live but never got round to moving. Emil Podlaszewski, Wikia’s new head of product development in Poland, was introduced to Wikia but didn’t actually start until later in the year. The Polish team has been expanding every month since.
June
I attended the iX conference in Singapore and appeared on TV for the first time, doing three televised interviews about Wikipedia whilst I was in Asia. Gil Penchina officially became Wikia’s CEO this month and Rieke and Solensean joined Wikia’s community team. I resigned from the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation after a bad decision by the rest of the Board. WikiZine made my resignation public in July and it took effect in September when Erik Möller was elected to replace me.
July
I went to the Brisbane for the first time for the Students of Sustainability conference. Splarka joined Wikia’s community team as an intern. Bill Kaufman joined Wikia as head of verticals. Wikia had a lot of press regarding Jimmy’s launch of the Campaigns Wikia.
August
My third trip to the US this year was for Wikimania (blog post), Wikimedia’s second annual conference, which was held at Harvard. Tim and I stopped in New York for a few days before it and I rushed back after it for the X|Media|Lab event in Melbourne - it was last year’s event in November which led to me staying in Australia so it was great to be there again. I fitted in a second trip to Brisbane this month, for an Open Innovation Round Table discussion. Next in August, I made a very long trip to Denmark for WikiSym where I gave a keynote on how and why Wikipedia works. Then it was back to Melbourne to talk about Future Directions for Free Content at the Churchill Club (blog post). Mindspillage and Solensean left Wikia this month and Splarka joined as a permanent staff member.
September
Juan David joined Wikia’s community team. Tim was ill for most of September and needed surgery so it was an otherwise quiet month.
October
I made few plans for the rest of the year since Tim and I weren’t sure when we’d be going to England, but events nearby kept me busy. I visited Brisbane for the third time, this time to talk about Copyright Challenges and User Generated Technologies. I went to Canberra the next day to take part in the Digital Culture series of talks at the National Library of Australia and then attended James Dellow’s Rebooting the Enterprise talk before returning to Melbourne.
November
We’d hoped to leave for England before November but it was too soon after Tim’s operation for him to fly so far, though we did fly to NSW for Tim’s mother’s birthday. The English Wikipedia reached 1.5 million articles.
December
Wikia’s first big announcement this month was the acquisition of ArmchairGM. Robert Lefkowitz, Aaron Wright, Dan Lewis and David Pean joined Wikia as part of the acquititsion and began work on OpenServing (blog post). Wikia announced its second round of investment - all of it from Amazon - on December 8th (blog post). We had two big hits in the press shortly after this - firstly with OpenServing which is still in testing, and will be more widely available very soon, and secondly with “Wikiasari“, which didn’t really exist before the press made it up, but may well exist at some point next year. 
I started WikiChix, a new community for women involved with wikis, in response to concerns that women were not comfortable posting to Wikipedia’s mailing lists. Anthere invited me to chair Wikimedia’s new Advisory Board. After attending the fun Stirr Sydney event, I packed up and left Australia, at least temporarily. We spent a day and a half in London before going to see my parents. Tim spent his first Christmas away from home, with my family, and we’ll be spending new year’s at my sister’s.
2007
My New Year’s resolution is to make no plans. I don’t know if or when I’ll be back in Australia and I have no idea where Wikia will be in a year from now. I wouldn’t have predicted a year ago that we’d now have 40 staff, two rounds of investment, 60000 registered users, and more than 400000 articles, so I’m not attempting to predict next year. I just hope it’s as amazing as this year was.
Happy New Year!
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You can give the gift of knowledge by donating to the Wikimedia Foundation!
If you were thinking of donating to the Wikimedia Foundation, then today is a good day to do that since your donation with be matched by Virgin Unite, the charitable arm of the Virgin Group. See “Wikimedia thanks Virgin Unite“.
This is the Foundation’s first fundraising drive since January this year. Unregistered users have been shown a permanent link calling for donations since then, which has decreased the need for quarterly fundraising drives. This drive is focused on the reliability of Wikimedia’s content and the long-term sustainability of every Wikimedia project.
You may have to read about Virgin Unite on Wikipedia since unfortunately their site went down within 12 minutes of being linked from Wikimedia’s site notices (these appear at the top of every page of every Wikimedia project - see “Slashdot effect“). If the site stays up, you can also donate to Virgin Unite’s projects.
This is the first time any organization has been allowed a logo in Wikipedia’s site notice. The thanks to Yahoo for the servers in April 2005 included a controversial link (but no logo) to Jimmy’s post on the Yahoo Search Blog and wasn’t attempted again until now. Wikimedia’s FAQ on matching donations is hoped to allay the concerns people might have about whether this constitutes advertising, with the official view being that it does not.
Donate here
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Wikia launched OpenServing today. OpenServing empowers everyone to run their own collaborative content project for free, starting with the great software we acquired with ArmchairGM.
The crazy part is that we’re giving away all of the advertising revenue and thereby enabling new business models for bloggers and web site owners.
It’s completely free; free as in beer, free as in freedom, and free as in content, software, bandwidth, storage and computing power!
We’re extending the essence of the open source model and beginning a new phase in Wikia’s development. OpenServing is also a call-out to developers that want to take open source to the next level and we are looking for volunteers to help us install and maintain other open-source software at OpenServing.com. Let us know on our developer forum if you’d like to get involved.
You can visit OpenServing.com or read our press release for more information.
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Not content with enabling people to edit wikis whilst away from their computers with Miki, the mobile wiki, Socialtext now lets you edit whilst away from the Internet with Socialtext Unplugged.
My first thought was that if I could read and edit wikis when I was offline, when would I ever read books? But considering the increasing number of books being published on wikis, perhaps that won’t be a problem. :)
An example which was released today is Lessig’s Codev2, the first book dedicated to Wikipedia. The book was edited on a JotSpot wiki and is now being freely published on a Socialtext wiki under a Creative Commons license.
Here are a few more examples of books with wikis. If you know of any others, please add them to the list on my wiki.
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Florence Devouard, Wikimedia’s new chair, announced today the appointment of three new members of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation. Kat Walsh and Oscar van Dillen will join immediately and Jan-Bart de Vreede will replace Tim Shell later this month.
Kat was one of Wikia’s first community staff members. Jan-Bart works for the Kennisnet Foundation which both provides hosting for Wikimedia and pays for hosting from Wikia (Kennisnet is in fact Wikia’s only paying customer). Kat and Oscar were the runners up in the 2006 Board elections which were held to find a replacement for me after I resigned.
In the related Board resolution, the board reaffirmed its commitment to expand further in the coming years. The resolution also says that Tim Shell will resign on December 15, that the terms of Jimmy Wales and Michael Davis will expire in December 2007, and that Florence’s term will be extended by a year.
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The first STIRR Sydney event (see previous post) was well worth attending, especially to hear more about the stealthy startups 3eep and Tangler, both of which have exciting plans for communities. Just as I was leaving the party, Amazon’s investment in Wikia was announced online. The hotel I was staying at had DNS issues so I’d had no Internet access all afternoon and didn’t realise the announcement was quite so imminent else I might have been able to chat about it in Sydney. Not that our ArmchairGM acquisition and our new OpenServing project weren’t enough to talk about. :)
I’m really pleased about the investment since it makes the future of Wikia not only more
stable, but also more exciting because it allows us to meet the dreams of our community members as we’ll have more resources to carry out their feature requests.
Here are two great quotes from the press release:
“We want to support the continued growth of sites like Wikia, which has cracked the code for user-generated content.” –Jeff Bezos, Amazon.
“Amazon is a leader in offering customer generated content, and we are delighted to have them as a strategic investor in Wikia. With Amazon’s support, Wikia will be able to expand and serve new communities around the globe on an even greater range of topics.” –Jimmy Wales, Wikia
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As leaked on TechCrunch, Wikia has acquired ArmchairGM! The sports site is running a heavily adapted MediaWiki and includes the traditional wiki features as well as blogs, easy commenting and voting functionality which allows the community to select the best content to automatically feature on the site’s home page. The site was created by Robert Lefkowitz, Aaron Wright, Dan Lewis and David Pean who we are really pleased to have joining Wikia. They seem to have a great sense of community which they’ve been able to apply to ArmchairGM. They’ve also developed some interesting features which we hope to integrate into some of our existing wikis. See the Head Scout page for example, which tracks the site activity (including votes, edits, and comments) in real time with no need to refresh. We’ll be releasing a related site very soon which will allow bloggers to make use of ArmChairGM content on their own sites.
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Offlist chat about the recent discussions on systemic gender bias in Wikipedia made it clear that a number of women were not comfortable contributing to the conversation there. In response to this, I have created WikiChix, a wiki and mailing list for female wiki editors to discuss issues of gender bias in wikis, to find ways of encouraging more female editors, and just as a place that females can feel more comfortable posting to.
This new community is named after, and inspired by, LinuxChix, the women-oriented community for Linux users.
If you are female and interested in wikis, I would like to encourage you to join the mailing list.
Some of the pages on the wiki are openly editable, so even if you’re not female, you are welcome to post your comments.
The FAQs for related communities answer a lot of questions about why this was created, so please read those for more information until we have our own FAQ.
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If you’re involved with a web 2.0 startup in Australia, come to the first STIRR Sydney event next Wednesday. STIRR aims “to catalyze entrepreneurial activity” and has hosted a number of events in San Francisco, but this is the first one in Australia. Over 75 people have already signed up for the event which will include demos from Remember The Milk, Quotify, and Student Face.
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Congratulations to Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, founders of Atlassian which produces the enterprise wiki Confluence, for being named Entrepreneurs of the Year 2006 by Ernst and Young.
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