Jimmy; "#Wikia will be bigger than #Google"

Im Interview sagte Wikipedia-Gründer Jimmy Wales, dass er mit Wikia einmal erfolgreicher als Google sein wird...

Quotes are lovely, particularly those quotes that have a chance of happening if only.. If you do not know yet, Wikia is doing really well; it recently celebrated its 100,000th Wiki, they have a sitewide rich text editor and they even have Mikhail Gorbachev writing in one of their wikis !!

When it is the ambition of Wikia to be as successful as Google, it has to learn many lessons from Google, adapt them and improve on them. Google spends a lot of effort on supporting languages, they have to as it is their bread and butter. For them it is everything from localising their software and analysing the Internet for a language and advertising based on context. Wikia does not face such a daunting task; it only has to ensure that the best possible localised user interface is provided.

Wikia is doing good but it could be better. As a result of moving their localisation effort to translatewiki.net both quality and quality of the internationalisation and the localisations have improved. New localisations go live on a weekly basis and translatewiki is synchronised regularly with the latest Wikia development.

So what is left to improve.. It is the localisation of the MediaWiki software itself. For many languages the localisation is not complete. The recent changes at translatewiki is where you can observe the slow but steady improvements for many languages. When Wikia would use the LocalisationUpdate extension, all the localisations relevant to Wikia would be picked up and, at no cost, the usability of Wikia would improve.

It would also provide the intrinsic motivation for the language communities at Wikia to contribute to the MediaWiki localisation.. Everybody will be a winner.
Thanks,
    GerardM