WikiAnswers is not Wikianswers. There is wiki.answers.com, and then there is answers.wikia.com. And confusingly, Wikianswers.com points to one of them.
Did you get that? Well you’re not the only one who didn’t.
Seth Finkelstein has a good rundown on this latest confusion among the companies spun off from the Wikipedia Revolution.
His blog and his Guardian article are pretty unequivocal:
In my opinion, Wikia’s relaunch of its site using the name Wikianswers is sleazy and unethical in the face of the far more well-known and successful Answers.com [site].
For those who don’t know, Answers.com has been a major donor and supporter of the Wikimania conference over the years, as has Wikia, which makes this showdown all the more intriguing.
Bob Rosenschein, CEO of Answers Corporation (owners of reference site Answers.com and Q&A site WikiAnswers.com) had this to say regarding Wikia’s site with the same name – http://www.nostupidanswers.com/2009/02/03/wikianswers-setting-the-record-straight/
Full Text:
WikiAnswers: setting the record straight.
We are admirers of Jimmy Wales but must set the record straight about the recent statement on Wikia’s site that he is the “founder of Wikianswers”. Wikia’s Answers category is indeed one of thousands of wikis on its site, right between Ansible and Anthony Trollope. It started in November 2004 and had almost no activity for the past four years. By August 2007, the site had a total of 17 answers. By their launch last week, there were about 1,000. The site remains very small, despite their seeding thousands of unanswered questions last week.
In June of 2004, an entrepreneur named Chris Whitten bought the domain http://www.wikianswers.com. He pointed it to his user-generated Q&A site, then known as FAQ Farm. A vibrant community of passionate contributors formed and did a fantastic job answering questions. By the time Chris sold FAQ Farm and wikianswers.com to us in November 2006, the site already had 280,000 questions and 200,000 answers. Shortly thereafter, we re-named the product WikiAnswers.
True to Chris’ vision, our goal is to create the world’s greatest question and answer site. We are well on our way, and the numbers tell the story best: over 8,000,000 questions (35,000 new ones every day); over 3,000,000 answers (10,000 new every day); 16.5 million unique visitors in the US and 26.7 worldwide in December, according to comScore; over 2 million registered users; and over 500 volunteer supervisors. 16.5 million unique visitors in the US and 26.7 worldwide in December, according to comScore; We do agree with Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia Inc., that “there is room for many organizations to be successful in organizing human knowledge.” However, Wikia is creating market confusion by associating its Q&A category with our market-leading WikiAnswers domain and site.
I would like to thank WikiAnswers founder Chris Whitten and the community that he started for their wonderful efforts building WikiAnswers. We have much to be proud of. According to comScore, by percentage growth,WikiAnswers.com was the fastest growing top 200 US domain for all of 2008.
– Robert Rosenschein
CEO, Answers Corporation
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FAQ Farm was a WikiMania conference sponsor as well. In 2006, long before being sold to Answers.com and officially renamed WikiAnswers, FAQ Farm handed out hundreds of free t-shirts at the Boston conference that said “FAQ Farm: The WikiAnswers community.”
http://answers.wikia.com was the first to launch. I don’t understand how the other guy can copy it and get away with it.
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