meta sentence!

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.) But today Wikia launches a whole new wiki devoted to and only to the environment at green.wikia.com.

When we talked to Jimmy yesterday, 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.