Wikia has quietly launched semi-private college/university wikis. And they’ve taken a page out of Facebook’s game plan by requiring users to have an approved university email address in order to edit the wiki. The wiki itself, however, is viewable by everyone.
The goal is to have better data by keeping out people who aren’t directly affiliated with the university. On the downside, of course, is the fact that people have to find their college email address in order to add content. Facebook clearly provides enough incentive to users to do that. It isn’t clear yet if Wikia will have the same level of success.
An example wiki for Stanford is here. Information on creating a semi-private university wiki is here.
This is still an experiment, and pre-existing open wiki’s about colleges and universities can be found at students.wikia.com. No word from Wikia on how they will handle having two versions of wikis for each university (one open and one semi-private).
Wikia continues to march along and do well after raising $4 million back in March and hiring a former eBay executive, Gil Penchina, to lead the company. Gil says Wikia is now generating 5 million daily page views on a million unique visitors. And their recently launched Travel Guides now have over 1,200 articles in ten languages covering 160 cities, just eight weeks after launch.