This is a copy of an e-mail I sent to Gil Penchina, Angela Beesley, and Jimmy Wales about the launch of their new "world travel guide", world.wikia.com. I'm the co-founder of another Open Content travel guide, Wikitravel, which just merged with a rival project, World66. I was disappointed when I heard about the launch of world.wikia.com, and I thought an email was appropriate.
Gil, Angela, Jimmy,
I'm writing to you about world.wikia.com.
As wiki service providers, we straddle two very different worlds: the competitive world of Web business, and the cooperative world of Free Culture.
From a business perspective, nothing is more natural than having two or more competing Web sites in the same space. It stirs us to provide better products and service to our customers.
But from a Free Culture perspective, having two incompatible, uncooperative projects working on the same problem is wasteful and wrong-headed. It splits the community's effort and time; it wastes energy on needless antagonism; and it makes people sit out entirely as they wait to see whether either project will succeed.
I don't have a problem with world.wikia.com from a business point of view; I've always liked Wikia as a company and I hope that you thrive and succeed. But I think you need to consider the Free Culture perspective and see what you can do to work with other projects in the space.
One strong move you can make is to choose a license compatible with Wikitravel, World66, and OpenGuides. We all use Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0, which makes it possible to share information between all the projects.
A more important effort would be to find a mission for world.wikia.com that complements rather than competes with existing projects. Travel is a big space and you're creative people; I think you can do a lot here.
At the very least, we should consider ways to share low-level information infrastructure. Much like Red Hat and SuSE collaborate on Linux components but compete in their overall package, we could work out ways to share information.
The Wikitravel community has a project for cooperating with other Free Culture projects:
http://wikitravel.org/en/Wikitravel:Fellow_Traveller_Expedition
We've started a page to brainstorm how to cooperate with world.wikia.com:
http://wikitravel.org/en/Wikitravel:Cooperating_with_World_Wiki
We'd love to have your input and ideas. I think the wiki community is looking for you to do the right thing here; I hope you see your way clear to factor in the needs of Free Culture to your business decisions.