Wikia launches three wiki magazines

Wikia has launched three open-source, magazine-style wikis to cover entertainment, local US communities and politics.

The new sites are part of Wikia's drive to form a portfolio of community-created and edited news sites.

The three user-driven communities have been cast from the mould of ArmchairGM - the wiki sports site Wikia bought last year - incorporating many of the same community-driven interactive features such as democratic sorting of content through rating, blogging and the ability to edit entries.

Dan Lewis, co-founder of ArmchairGM and vice president of business development at Wiki, told Journalism.co.uk that the sites would give bloggers a platform and audience that they would not otherwise reach from their own sites.

"These new sites have a lot of features that you would expect from blogs but all built into a wiki platform," said Mr Lewis.

"We are hoping to get a lot of content this way; according to Technorati there are 55 million blogs out there, most of which go unread. If those people are writing to find readers then they might as well write where other people are writing, reading, collaborating and commenting."

He added: "People don't really have the time to write everything up that they are thinking then send it around to many postings to get mass coverage. What we are hoping to do is remove a lot of the barriers to entry for great ideas and allow the community at large to complement those ideas and help people hone them through wiki editing."

The three new sites are all supported by advertising revenue and allow users to use a single sign-in name and password.

The entertainment site aims to host reviews and news about TV and movies. Your Local Community claims to have individual sections for nearly every town in the US (based on zip codes) for users to post and edit news and information on local events.

The Politics wiki community will cover international, national and local news.

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