Jimmy Wales is best known for his role in founding Wikipedia, but he is also involved in Wikia, a startup focused on fostering online communities that take a wiki-like approach to community-driven content. In that role, he has to balance his commitment to open information against profitability and the potential for growth, a balancing act made more difficult by the current economic downturn. The hard economic realities hit home this week, as Wales announced the termination of a project, Wikia Search, that he has spent several years developing and promoting.
Wikia search was first announced back in 2006; the following year, it purchased a distributed search indexing service called Grub. In keeping with the emphasis on open information, the Grub project was made open source, allowing anyone to look over the algorithms involved in generating search results. After an extended test period, the site finally went live last year.
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