ReadWriteWeb

According to this year's Comscore stats, consumer publishing platform Wikia has surpassed DIY social network competitor Ning for monthly unique visitors. Since July 2008 the company's traffic has more than doubled from 2.8 million to 6.5 million unique US visitors per month. Despite abandoning Wikia search in early March, it seems Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has built another great company. As of this evening, Wikia's CEO Gil Penchina is announcing the company's profitability due to its custom sponsorships program.

MindTouch, maker of enterprise software it dubs "collaborative networks," has long had a focus on the creation of both public and private knowledge bases. Today it has added an external-facing version of its software for letting customers contribute to the information about your enterprise. Backed by a strong moderation system, the MindTouch Collaborative Knowledge Base is designed to open up your product documentation, FAQs, support guides, and other kinds of corporate information.

With both technical and cultural roots in wikis, the company previously added an intranet to its suite of both open source and proprietary enterprise software. Now they want you to make the content you're already providing to the public editable.

Prior to 2001, gilded hard cover encyclopedias were cracked to fact check everything from raptor names to State capitals. Today the world's most popular English encyclopedia is more often used to identify pop culture icons and social media companies. A recent Telegraph article listed the 50 most-viewed Wikipedia articles of 2008 and 2009 and while the results are slightly inaccurate, they're pretty interesting. Below are this year's most visited Wikipedia pages measured in hits per day.

MindTouch — the open source, wiki-based intranet — is the first software to bring fully collaborative video to the enterprise. The new feature comes from open source video platform Kaltura, which is also developing video editing for Wikipedia. Through Kaltura, MindTouch customers will be able to cooperatively edit, publish and syndicate video both inside and outside the firewall, all with a complete revision history.

In addition to collaborative video editing, users can now package their applications and content for reuse on other installations. Developers will be able create open source add-ons that operate just like those in Firefox, and anyone can use a desktop GUI to select content for staging and migration.

MindTouch, the collaborative software that began as a fork of MediaWiki, has just launched the first of three new turnkey collaborative networks for the enterprise that go far beyond the software's beginnings as a wiki.

With the next two scheduled to be made public in the next six months, this first new release is of the MindTouch Collaborative Intranet.

This intranet is focused on taking all the information from your legacy applications and integrating them in to the much more accessible interface that MindTouch has inherited from its other open source and enterprise implementations. The goal is to take the resources you need and break down the silos that separate them to create a fabric of information that is easy to comb through and work with.

Disclosure: Socialtext is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.

On the 30th anniversary of the original killer business application, enterprise platform Socialtext has brought wiki spreadsheet app SocialCalc in to the light of day.

Created in collaboration with VisiCalc co-creator Dan Bricklin, the long-awaited app is the social enterprise successor to Bricklin's original innovation. Begun in 2006 and now in public beta, its a more fully-functional version of his concept of WikiCalc.

Along with the public beta of SocialCalc, the company has transformed its offering in to a freemium price plan dubbed "Socialtext Free 50." The 50-user version will see their collaborative software become available free of cost for the first time.

Late last year, an $890,000 grant was awarded to the Wikimedia Foundation (the non-profit behind Wikipedia). It was dedicated solely to a new Usability Initiative for improvements to MediaWiki.

Now, the first designs and prototypes have been made public.

Though only a fraction of what's in store, the work done so far is showing real promise not just for Wikipedia's future, but for MediaWiki in all instances. In a down economy, a new-and-improved MediaWiki could likely compete with more expensive and cumbersome enterprise collaboration solutions.

Today marks the 1.0 release of Wagn, a pioneering yet little-known software that wiki inventor Ward Cunningham has called "one of the freshest contributions to wiki since I coined the term."

Created by the non-profit Grass Commons and jump-started by a grant from the Meyer Memorial Trust, Wagn has been quietly honed into a tool that breaks new ground in collaborative software. What makes Wagn special is that it takes the wiki that you know and adds database structure and functionality. Also a simple CMS, Wagn can handle data like no wiki you've ever seen.

PBworks (which recently changed its name from PBwiki) has announced a new option for those seeking a hosted collaborative workspace, Project Edition.

On top of the basic free wiki, PBworks will now have five specialized products available. The enhanced project management features of the latest edition is just one reason why PBwork's revamped offerings are making headway in the enterprise.

In addition to the collaborative workspaces (i.e. souped-up WYSIWYG wiki pages) you're likely to be familiar with, Project Edition adds traditional project management features like tasks and milestones. Workspaces can also be linked together in Networks, allowing easier compartmentalization and coordination on a per-project basis.

Leading enterprise software provider Atlassian announced this morning the launch of Confluence 3.0, an upgrade to the wiki platform that we named one of the top 10 enterprise products of 2008. The new release significantly enhances the social networking side of Confluence, adding activity streams and Twitter-like status updates.

Atlassian has simultaneously debuted the Plugin Exchange, allowing users to download, rate, and review hundreds of 3rd party plugins, including the popular GreenHopper plugin for JIRA that it just acquired. All three announcements are part of the lineup for the company's sold-out user conference, the Atlassian Summit.