Gregg Kellogg recently discussed a project which he is involved with called Wikia: “Wikia hosts hundreds of thousands of special-interest wikis for things as varied as pokemon, best cellphone rate comparisons, TV shows and Video Games. For those of you not aware of Wikia, it is an outgrowth of the MediaWiki and was founded by Jimmy Wales as a for-profit means of using the MediaWiki platform for exactly such interests. Recently MediaWiki Deutschland started work on WikiData, an effort to use Semantic Web principles to create a factual knowledge base that can be used within Wikis (typically to replace Infobox information, which can vary between different language versions). This is a somewhat different direction than Semantic Media Wiki, which is more about using Wiki markup to express semantic relationships within a Wiki. As it happens JSON-LD is being considered as the data representation model for WikiData.”

He continues, “As it turns out, Wikia has been quite interested in leveraging these tools. I did mention that Wikia is a for-profit company; one way they do this is through in-page advertising, but the amount of knowledge curated by the hundreds of thousands of communities is staggering. Unfortunately, native Wiki markup just isn’t that semantic. However, much of the information represented is factual (at least within the world-view of the wiki community).”

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Image: Courtesy Wikia