Jimmy Wales, Chairman of Wikia, has been described as the man who will put Jeff Bezos out of business. While that might be an exaggeration, his projects are shaking up the future of the publishing industry. His vision is a world where every person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge, and he began moving towards that goal by founding and cultivating Wikipedia. His new company Wikia aims to produce the equivalent of an entire library to match the encyclopedia in Wikipedia.

While a popular subject on Wikipedia might have several hundred articles related to it, those same subjects have tens of thousands of articles on Wikia, covering every aspect of the topic in much greater detail. Wikia is following Wikipedia's growth and interest curve from a few years, both in the rapid creation of material and the skew towards "geek culture". Wikia is branching out into more mainstream content and is expected to be as diverse as Wikipedia in a few years. Although Wikia is a for-profit company, all of the content uses open licenses like GNU or Creative Commons, so it can be repurposed into new and creative forms.

Besides the in-depth guides, Wikia also has a magazine rack focused on news and opinion, and is developing an open source search engine. Since high quality search resutls have become a commodity, he hopes to create software that can be customized and run by content creators so they can regain some power from the aggregators. This is part of the openness and optimism that is necessary for a civil community, both online and off.