Yesterday I spoke with Chris Whitten, the founder of FAQFarm, who said, "It’s perplexing to me that Jimmy [Wales - Wikia President] and Gil [Penchina - Wikia CEO] would choose to relaunch their site as ‘Wikianswers.’Although it’s true that someone had started a Q&A Wikia years ago, that doesn’t mean they have any stronger claim to the name than WikiAnswers. I registered the WikiAnswers.com domain even earlier than that, in June 2004." More of what Whitten said here.

A Wikia representative was kind enough to put me in touch with Wikia CEO Gil Penchina. Here’s what he had to say:

FAQFARM was aware we were operating Wikianswers.

Wikia has hosted a Question & Answer wiki called Wikianswers since 2004, and we have revamped and re-launched it because we believe we can provide the best resource for people.

All that said, we believe Wikia’s Q&A site is better in part because its more in keeping with the wiki spirit.  The content is freely licensed (unlike wiki.answers.com) and anyone can contribute (wiki.answers.com requires you to register to change questions as an example). We believe that a more open, freely licensed community will always do better than any corporate site that takes customers contributions and copyrights them in a way that takes some rights away from the customer.

Ultimately it is up to users to decide which they like better. Those searching for "answers" might have a better chance of ending up with the Answers.com version. The first result on Google is Answers.com itself, which has a prominent link at the top to its version of Wiki Answers. A search for "wikianswers" also yields a top result of Answers.com’s version (though Wikia’s version is right below it).

UPDATE: Answers Corp. (the company behind the non-Wikia version) CEO Bob Rosenschein has a post up titled "WikiAnswers: setting the record straight," which offers his take on the subject:

We are admirers of Jimmy Wales but must set the record straight about the recent statement on Wikia’s site that he is the “founder of Wikianswers”.

Wikia’s Answers category is indeed one of thousands of wikis on its site, right between Ansible and Anthony Trollope. It started in November 2004 and had almost no activity for the past four years. By August 2007, the site had a total of 17 answers. By their launch last week, there were about 1,000. The site remains very small, despite their seeding thousands of unanswered questions last week… Read the post here.

Wiki Answers is a site that has been around for a while, and previously went by the name FAQFarm, until changing its name in 2007. It’s run by the Answers.com people and so far it ranks higher in google for "Wikianswers":

Both sites are Q&A sites that, as Erick Schonfeld puts it, attempt to "create one true, consensus answer for each question, wiki style."

So what answer do you get when you ask "How is Wikianswers different than other answer sites?" You get a long explanation clearly from the people behind Wikanswers (it’s less clear whether or not the answer comes from Wales himself):

Wikia’s Q+A service is in keeping with the wiki-way and that’s what makes it different

We believe that a more open, freely licensed community will always do better than a corporate site that takes customers contributions and copyrights them in order to take rights away from the contributor…

The "answer" goes on to talk about how there is room for more than one of these answer sites, which is a good thing considering there are already quite a few. It also says that Wikianswers has indeed been around since 2004, and that "FAQFarm" never had permission to change their name to Wiki Answers.

I contacted FAQFarm founder Chris Whitten to get his thoughts on the subject. He is no longer actively involved with WikiAnswers other than volunteering and advising. He sold the site to Answers Corp. back in 2006.

"It’s perplexing to me that Jimmy and Gil would choose to relaunch their site as ‘Wikianswers,’" he told me. "Although it’s true that someone had started a Q&A Wikia years ago, that doesn’t mean they have any stronger claim to the name than WikiAnswers. I registered the WikiAnswers.com domain even earlier than that, in June 2004."

"At the time I sold the site to Answers Corp. and they chose to officially change the name from FAQ Farm to WikiAnswers it had hundreds of thousands of answers and millions of unique users while the Wikia Q&A site was still tiny," he continued. "’WikiAnswers’ can’t be trademarked because it’s considered too generic a term, but WikiAnswers has been making good use of it for years. It was the fastest growing large US website in both 2007 and 2008. I can understand why Jimmy and Gil would want to imitate its success — I was imitating the success of Wikipedia when I converted my Q&A site to a wiki in 2004 –but why imitate the WikiAnswers name?"

An interesting question. Unfortunately neither site offers an answer to that one (yet).

The most visited website within the Questions and Answers category last week was Yahoo! Answers (answers.yahoo.com), which received 74.05 percent of the market share of U.S. visits. Wiki.Answers.com was the second most visited website receiving 18.35 percent of visits, followed by Answerbag.com, which received 4.42 percent of visits. WikiAnswers, launched in June 2007 has seen its U.S. visits increase 125 percent comparing the week ending Jun. 9, 2007 versus Mar. 15, 2008.

Labels: Yahoo

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