Wikia, a free Web hosting service for wikis, is launching a new niche site called Answers from Wikia, which gives anyone the tools to launch their own question and answers site.
Designed to let anybody, experienced with Web design or not, create a Q/A site, Wikia intends for users to create specific niche communities, targeted at a small cross-section of the Web audience.
“Start a new community and be the expert on your topic, whether it’s fraggle rock, regular expressions or Manolo Blahnik,” reads the introductory blurb on the new site. “Answers from Wikia is a great way to bring together the detail of a question and answer site with the warm, cosy feeling of being surrounded by people who are passionate about the same thing that you are. And since you’re the founder, you can say what goes on your own site.”
Early last year, Wikia launched a very similar site called Wikianswers, where users can ask questions in the community. Wikianswers competes with Yahoo Answers and WikiAnswers (a different site from the first), two other popular sites where people can ask the community just about anything.
Though Wikianswers doesn’t require users to register to ask or answer questions, Answers from Wikia will require registration since the user who creates the site will be responsible for management of the community.
Wikia, which claims more than 12 million monthly US visitors, recently surpassed IGN as the number one domestic destination for news and information about games, according to data from Quantcast.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley in 2004 founded Wikia, which achieved profitability in September 2009.
