Wikia Launches Four New Mag-Sites...sort of
Yesterday, open-source guidepost Wikia announced the launch of three new magazine-style collaborations as part of its "open source magazine" project. They follow the same Wikipedia template/ user style and are:
• Restaurants.wikia: a review site with user contributions of comments and menus. Like Zagat without the subscription fees. So far, there are 20,000 restaurants covered in cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Chicago and Boston.
• Foodie.wikia: Recipes, cookbooks, food encyclopedias, etc.
•Fitness.wikia: Community site for fitness, dieting, exercising, nutrition, weight training.
• Mortgages.wikia: You guessed it: mortgages. Everything you could possibly want to know about them.
From Dan Lewis, vice president of business development at Wikia: "As with our other open-source magazine sites, we hope that the new sites launched today continue to give people the opportunity to create and share information on the topics that are most important to them."
I understand the Wiki concept and why Angela Beesley and Jimmy Wales launched the service. What I don't understand is how these four "magazine" sites differ from Wikipedia entries. I know that users can rate and rank entries, that they can blog...but it seems to me that these sites just rearrange citizen content. I think "magazine" and suddenly I want multiple features, interactive stories, long-form narratives and great photography.
Other Wikia "magazine" sites: Entertainment, Gaming, Sports, Politics.
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