Wiki Vendors Wrangle Over Wiki.com Domain
Lately I've received some odd emails from wiki vendors Wikia and MindTouch about the domain wiki.com. A brief history: wiki.com (the domain name) was bought last year by entrepreneur John Gotts for a staggering $2.86
Million. After purchasing it, Gotts partnered with MindTouch, a wiki vendor comprised of
ex-Microsoft employees. At the time the huge domain name price was justified as a natural
driver of traffic. From the August 2006 press release:
"With its easily identifiable name, thousands of people are visiting the site daily without the aid of a search tool, signaling increasing interest in the technology and the value of a domain that drives natural traffic."
Apparently 500 people signed up in the first five hours to wiki.com.
Then earlier this week a PR person from Wikia contacted me, saying there is a rumor that all wikis on wiki.com will be removed this week - and that Wikia intended to "rescue" those wiki.com customers. Wikia you may recall is the company co-founded by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
Right now Wikia has a wiki page up saying that MindTouch is shutting down by January 25, 2007 (see Message from Mindtouch). Wikia's page currently reads:
"Wiki.com is not affiliated in any way with Wikia.com. Wikia has no control or ownership of the domain wiki.com. This rescued wiki was created following rumors that wiki.com was closing down. At the time, there was no indication whether wiki.com wikis would disappear or not, so Wikia made plans to migrate these sites to Wikia. Since then, MindTouch have said that they have begun migrating the wiki.com wikis to new servers and that the content of these sites will be made available on a new domain in future."
What is confusing me here is that currently wiki.com actually re-directs to Wikia! But how is that possible if Wikia has no control over the domain wiki.com?
Anyway this morning I received an email from MindTouch, stating that MindTouch will officially take over all hosting and support of Wiki.com no later than January 25. However it seems that MindTouch will not get control over the domain, wiki.com. They note: "The Wiki.com domain name will not convey - all customer content will now be available at www.wik.is."
So what is going on here! What is happening to the domain wiki.com, for which such a princely sum was paid, and how does Wikia have control over the wiki.com domain currently? What seems to have happened is that MindTouch and Gotts have gone their separate ways. The domain name wrangling suggests that Gotts may've done a deal with Wikia for it. But it's all very confusing and wiki.com users must be scratching their heads and wondering where they stand.
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The front page of wiki.com has been redirecting to Wikia for a few weeks now, well before the announcement that the service is going away. Confusing indeed.
Yes, I've seen the redirection for weeks, but right now it's stopped, and the current announcement says:
wiki.com is now wik.is.
Oops, sorry, you've got the wik.is part covered, I missed that part and focused on the wikia redirection. Sorry...
Earlier this week, the closure of wiki.com was just a rumor. Mindtouch have since confirmed that its true but the good news is that they're making efforts to migrate the wikis from wiki.com to a new site. I set up rescued.wikia.com when we didn't know whether these wikis would just be disappearing next week, but I've since integrated Mindtouch's statement with that wiki and changed the focus of that wiki from saving sites (which hopefully won't now be necessary) to informing users about the options they have.
It is wiki.com which is shutting down - not to be confused with either Wikia or Mindtouch.
i'd prefer wikipedia acquiring it for an ad-sponsored fork of itself
wik.is - how do you spell it? I would say it is a very difficult name to promote... Indeed I have been considering the domain when starting my own Wiki farm...
IMHO Wiki.com had a terrible model - software was crappy, it simply did not encourage any creativity... quite surprisingly I have started my own Wiki farm almost exactly when wiki.com started...
now I have ~100 registered users daily, over 1 mln pageviews and 100 000 unique visitors monthly. IMHO Wiki market is large.
So - it was a terrible failure. Mindtouch software was simply not suitable for a typical user.
regards
Michal Frackowiak
http://www.wikidot.com
The reason is that John Gotts didn't "buy" wiki.com - he entered into a contract to buy it that required 6 monthly payments of only $10k followed by an optional $2.8m final payment to complete the purchase - this was 6 months ago.
Clearly that final payment hasn't been made.
I am definitely sure that it is not an rumour, the moving event has taken place.
I think the new name, wik.is, is brilliant and I'll bet it didn't cost $3M. It's a big undertaking for MindTouch and I'm glad to see they are offering to keep my wiki alive and well. And, for what it is worth, I think Wiki.com had excellent software, it just had a tosser for an owner (Gotts).
Thank you to the boys at MindTouch.
Thanks Martiniano! We're glad you like the service and the new domain. MindTouch is excited to be supporting, hosting, and maintaining www.wik.is (for the first time). The community of users is quite large and has been very enthusiastic in their emails to us.
Not quite the hero that the above post would suggest. It seems that Gotts is accused of ripping off his backers (see http://files.ww...iles/28308.html for full details) and the courts have issued restraining order against him (see http://files.ww...iles/28309.html for full details). Gotts wasn’t kind to anyone, he simply drove it to the limit with money he didn’t own, and muddied the water for everyone else.
This guy isn’t a serial entrepreuneur, he’s a parallel disaster, perhaps a contender for the worst thing that has hit the internet this year (and last for that matter).
Mindtouch appear to have earned quite nicely out of their association with Gotts, and it looks like they are now using code they were paid for by Gotts (if they ever got paid) on the new site. I suspect they are taking care of themselves as opposed to taking care of any community, but that is what business is all about
But what about the poor people who were conned into financing Gotts?