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Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia and owner of Wikia, just went all ecogeek on us. Wikia focuses on creating deep-diving wikis in particular subjects (usually extraordinarily dorky subjects, like Star Wars or World of Warcraft.) But today Wikia launches a whole new wiki devoted to and only to the environment at green.wikia.com.
When we talked to Jimmy yesterday, he seemed genuinely excited about bringing Wikia's power to the environment.
When we think about star wars, star wars is geek culture. They can debate five points very plotholes. At the same time Star Wars is obviously a very mass market phenomenon. It's the uberfans writing for the normal fans.
I think the same thing is going on in the green space. Not only do some people think it's the most important thing, but they're motivated excited and involved. So we want to give these people a place where they can write about it with mass market and mass appeal.
But one of the coolest things for me was finding out why Jimmy Wales, one of the most influential geeks in the world, was suddenly so into the environment.
I'm just like anybody, I've been aware of the environment, but for a long time didn't have any clue what to think. When I first started hearing about global warming, I just thought it was just another cancer-scare-of-the-week.
There's a physicist, David Duetsch, who I saw speak at TED global, (watch the talk here)...what I took away from his talk was 'look, we have to innovate our way out of this. It's the problem of the century, but rather than beating ourselves up, and making into a political issue, we have to make it a technology issue. Technology got us here, so technology is going to have to get us out'
That really had a striking effect on me. Also, in the last couple of years I've seen a lot of people here in Silicon Valley who are focusing a lot of investment effort on the environment. They're not doing it as a charitable project, they're thinking 'there's a problem here, so there's an opportunity here too.'
When I see that smart people are investing good money, that's when it's time to start to pay attention.
That's a lot of the same stuff that we say here at EcoGeek every day, but it's wonderful to hear it from Jimmy. While there are some other Green Wiki projects, particularly Huddler's Green Home, which we love, there's no denying that Wikia brings a lot to the table. What Wikia has a larger user base, more funding, and a proven system for growing the user base.
Huddler beats them hands down on usability and aesthetics though. Huddler needs to focus more on community growth, but I'm pretty surprised to find their system more robust and user friendly than Wikia's.The sites definitely aren't competitors though, while Wikia Green wants to be an all-inclusive green information resource with information on everything from Leonardo Dicaprio to biofuels. Huddler is focusing more on informing consumer decisions and green product reviews.
In the end, I think both will prove to be extremely useful services.
In order to get the new wiki growing, Wikia has begun seeding a bunch of content on their green site, and they'll be doing their best to attract and retain a community of informed green folks. I have to say, as one of those "uberfans" of the environment, I'm tempted to join up.
And while I'd definitely be happy to dub Jimmy an official EcoGeek, he was less ready to take on the moniker:
I would consider myself in the group of more mainstream fans. I don't have the time or the energy to get informed enough to write content, so I'm hopeful that the people who really are ecogeeks can produce something that the rest of us can read in order to become more informed.
Well Jimmy, we'll see what we can do.
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written by Chriswaterguy, September 10, 2008
Cooperation is key and we look forward to ways to collaborate as we have with lots of other great wikis and organizations working towards a healthier world. It will be interesting to see where Wikia Green grows - it has always struck me as a subset of Appropedia's work, but I can see the value of Wikia Green focusing more on the mainstream consumer content, if that's the intention, and Appropedia continuing to focus on applications.
There are plenty of ways wikis can work together - e.g. content on the more hands-on science & tech wikis (like Appropedia) could be a source of content for more consumer-oriented sites. And being open content, there's always the option for content to move till it finds a suitable home.
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written by Chriswaterguy, September 10, 2008
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written by peter, September 11, 2008
I am not saying the green wiki has "borrowed" the picture or has any knowledge of the charity, just interesting that they occupy the same 'space' and have almost identical....symbols.
Anyway, for what its worth, the website does look like an interesting and potentially valuable resource for things green.
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written by naught101, December 16, 2008
http://green.wikia.com/wiki/Sp...mbo_Wales
Appropedia is awesome, and far more deserving of eco-geek cred than greenwikia.
Also, there are a number of other environmental wikis, including http://www.envirowiki.info , which has been up for about two years.
Funny how the promo follows the fame, eh?
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To be clear, I think that a "Green" wiki could be a very useful tool - provided that big corporations do not use it to push their agendas, as I have seen happen on Wikipedia. As a regular reader of this and Carectomy.com I am more troubled by what I see as someone taking attempting to exploit such a sensitive topic for personal gain without actually caring about the outcome. My prediction is that it will go the way of his much touted search engine. In other words, wasted effort, which could have well been spent elsewhere.