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Wikia:Press: Wikia opens new "magazine rack" websites

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[edit] WIKIA LAUNCHES NEW COMMUNITY WEB SITES, ADDS HIGHLY INTERACTIVE FEATURES IN ON-GOING QUEST FOR COLLABORATION

New sites focus on entertainment, local information and politics, several more already in the works

NEW YORK, (PRWEB) February 13, 2007— Wikia, Inc., (http://www.wikia.com ) the leading provider of community resources for building free content on every topic, today unveiled three new communities for entertainment, local and politics, in a move designed to significantly enhance the ability of passionate people to collaborate online. Following its acquisition of the popular online sports community, ArmchairGM ( http://www.armchairgm.com ) last year, Wikia began working to create fan-driven communities that incorporate the same interactive features of the ArmchairGM site, including democratic sorting of content, blogging, commenting and more.

The new collaborations announced today include:

  • The Entertainment Community ( http://entertainment.wikia.com ), which provides T.V. and movie lovers with a place to create episode guides, movie and actor reviews, or blog about all-things Hollywood.
  • Your Local Community ( http://local.wikia.com ), which features individual sections for nearly every town in the United States--users can search for their town's section using their zip code. On the site, anyone can post local news, information on local events, blog about local happenings or create a place for discussion around issues facing their community.
  • The Politics Community ( http://politics.wikia.com ), which features national, state and local sections where users are able to search and contribute by state and/or zip code. Contributors can share and discuss their political opinions, build out historical resources and voter guides, or simply just read and comment on the others thoughts and learn about political issues.

“We learned a lot about enthusiastic fans and communities as we built ArmchairGM,” said Dan Lewis, co-founder of ArmchairGM and vice president of business development at Wikia. “Clearly sports are a topic that a lot of people care about, but there are thousands of others. Adding Entertainment, Local and Politics to the mix is just the first in a series of steps we will take to better enable people to come together online around common interests.”

The new communities have a similar look and feel, and allow people to blog, rate content and freely contribute news and information on topics they are passionate about. Users can access the three new communities through a single log-in and password and Wikia plans to roll-out additional communities on a wide variety of topics in the coming months.

“These new communities represent yet another step in our mission to give passionate people the ability to collaborate with others,” continued Lewis. “We want to provide as many ways as possible for people to contribute; they can visit Wikia to write about the facts and build-out the ‘books’ in the library. Now, they can join these new community websites to create the ‘magazine rack’, which is all about news, opinion and gossip.”

[edit] About Wikia, Inc.

Since Wikia’s launch in November 2004, over 400,000 articles on 2,000 topics have been created and edited by over 65,000 registered users in 45 languages. Currently, Wikia hosts a variety of sites including, the Music Wikia at http://music.wikia.com , the Marvel Comics Wikia at http://marveldatabase.wikia.com , and the online travel guide, World Wikia at http://world.wikia.com .

Wikia enables groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions that fall outside the scope of an encyclopedia. Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley launched Wikia in 2004 to provide community-based wikis inspired by the model of Wikipedia -- the free, open source encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales.

Wikia is committed to openness, inviting anyone to contribute web content. Authors retain their own copyrights and allow others to freely reuse their content under a variety of GNU and Creative Commons Licenses, allowing widespread distribution of knowledge and ideas.

[edit] About ArmchairGM

Started in March of 2006 by a group of four New York sports fanatics, ArmchairGM has grown to nearly 55,000 pages of user-generated content on all-things sports. The site currently offers a sports encyclopedia and dictionary, sports travel guides, “Ask the Chair” Q&A board, a sports blog index, the ability for users to submit and vote on the day’s most popular sports stories, and much more.

Press Contact:
Sierra Lovelace
Bite Communications
sierra.lovelace@bitepr.com
415-284-8210

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