Founder of Wikipedia launching environmental wiki

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia and owner of Wikia, just went all ecogeek on us. Wikia focuses on creating deep-diving wikis in particular subjects (usually extraordinarily dorky subjects, like Star Wars or World of Warcraft.) On Tuesday, Wikia launched a whole wiki devoted to the environment at green.wikia.com.

When we talked to Jimmy on Tuesday, he seemed genuinely excited about bringing Wikia's power to the environment.

When we think about star wars, star wars is geek culture. They can debate five points very plotholes. At the same time Star Wars is obviously a very mass market phenomenon. It's the uberfans writing for the normal fans.
I think the same thing is going on in the green space. Not only do some people think it's the most important thing, but they're motivated excited and involved. So we want to give these people a place where they can write about it with mass market and mass appeal.

But one of the coolest things for me was finding out why Jimmy Wales, one of the most influential geeks in the world, was suddenly so into the environment.

I'm just like anybody, I've been aware of the environment, but for a long time didn't have any clue what to think. When I first started hearing about global warming, I just thought it was just another cancer-scare-of-the-week. 

There's a physicist, David Duetsch, who I saw speak at TED global, (watch the talk here)...what I took away from his talk was 'look, we have to innovate our way out of this. It's the problem of the century, but rather than beating ourselves up, and making into a political issue, we have to make it a technology issue. Technology got us here, so technology is going to have to get us out'

That really had a striking effect on me. Also, in the last couple of years I've seen a lot of people here in Silicon Valley who are focusing a lot of investment effort on the environment. They're not doing it as a charitable project, they're thinking 'there's a problem here, so there's an opportunity here too.'

When I see that smart people are investing good money, that's when it's time to start to pay attention.

That's a lot of the same stuff that we say here at EcoGeek every day, but it's wonderful to hear it from Jimmy. While there are some other Green Wiki projects, particularly Huddler's Green Home, which we love, there's no denying that Wikia brings a lot to the table. What Wikia has a larger user base, more funding, and a proven system for growing the user base.

Huddler beats them hands down on usability and aesthetics though. Huddler needs to focus more on community growth, but I'm pretty surprised to find their system more robust and user friendly than Wikia's.The sites definitely aren't competitors though, while Wikia Green wants to be an all-inclusive green information resource with information on everything from Leonardo Dicaprio to biofuels. Huddler is focusing more on informing consumer decisions and green product reviews.

In the end, I think both will prove to be extremely useful services.

In order to get the new wiki growing, Wikia has begun seeding a bunch of content on their green site, and they'll be doing their best to attract and retain a community of informed green folks. I have to say, as one of those "uberfans" of the environment, I'm tempted to join up.

And while I'd definitely be happy to dub Jimmy an official EcoGeek, he was less ready to take on the moniker:

I would consider myself in the group of more mainstream fans. I don't have the time or the energy to get informed enough to write content, so I'm hopeful that the people who really are ecogeeks can produce something that the rest of us can read in order to become more informed.

Well Jimmy, we'll see what we can do.