Wikia launches open magazine sites
As someone who works with magazines quite a bit, I was interested to read that Wikia has launched three open magazine sites. Inspired by the success of Wikipedia, these sites are designed to be a forum for people to write more editorial/opinion pieces on the subjects (the broad subjects being politics, entertainment and local community) in addition to the dryer aspects like episode guides and the like.
Initially I was quite skeptical - it seemed to me that most of the content that would appear in this would normally appear either in Wikipedia or personal blogs. I’m not so sure anymore - if it attracts enough attention, content that might normally appear in someone’s blogs will gravitate towards it’s much larger audience. Also, it appears that these sites have additional functionality. Things like voting and separated out comments give it a more dynamic aspect instead of the large blob of text that wiki’s typically are.
A couple problems could crop up, though. First as a writer of opinion I could potentially be blogging on my own and generating ad revenue for myself. This may be a consideration for some - as we know google’s long tail is very long and even minor bloggers are getting a little income. And second - since this is going to be much more opinionated content will it be more prone to vandalism? If I write a negative review about someone’s favourite show they may be more inclined to go through and change everything up that I wrote.
I guess that’s the strange thing about it. As a magazine each piece has an author. But on a wiki, everyone’s the author. On Wikipedia that works because, in general, you’re trying to get facts straight - so if there’s something incorrect anyone can fix it (that’s the theory, right?). In a magazine, opinions are not right or wrong they are someone’s opinion. Why should that be up for editing by anyone other than that someone? And we’ve seen how ambiguous truth is on Wikipedia with people battling it out for their particular viewpoint - how much more of a problem will that be on these magazines where so much content will be opinion? It takes only a few people to mess it up for everyone.
I’m interested in following the progression of these, maybe they’re the wave of the future. If I had to place a bet I’d probably bet against them being too successful in the long run, but thankfully I don’t have to lay down that money.
