Jimmy Wales is best known for his role in founding Wikipedia, but he is also involved in Wikia, a startup focused on fostering online communities that take a wiki-like approach to community-driven content. In that role, he has to balance his commitment to open information against profitability and the potential for growth, a balancing act made more difficult by the current economic downturn. The hard economic realities hit home this week, as Wales announced the termination of a project, Wikia Search, that he has spent several years developing and promoting.

Wikia search was first announced back in 2006; the following year, it purchased a distributed search indexing service called Grub. In keeping with the emphasis on open information, the Grub project was made open source, allowing anyone to look over the algorithms involved in generating search results. After an extended test period, the site finally went live last year.

As with other sites that focus on user-contributed content, Wikia Search let anyone rate and filter its search results. In an interview with Ars, Wales portrayed this as in keeping with his general sense that the wisdom of the crowd could help minimize the role of editorial bias in search results. In Wales' view, any search service plays an editorial role, because it tunes its algorithms based on some sense of whether the results of search results matched some sort of standard. Wikia, he felt, was different because the source code for the search algorithm is available, and a crowd of fellow search users could refine things further.

Unfortunately, those crowds never materialized. In the blog post in which he announces that Wikia Search has reached the end of the line, Wales proudly points to the rapid growth of Wikia in general, citing Nielsen figures that show it nearly doubling its traffic in the past year, placing it fifth on the list of user community sites.

Unfortunately for Wikia Search fans, that growth came from other Wikia-branded services. (On the plus side, this presumably means that there are fewer such fans to be disappointed.) Although Wales doesn't provide any numbers, his focus on growth suggests that it wasn't simply the lack of users, but the fact that the service wasn't seeing the sort of momentum that other Wikia-branded properties were.

Wales also implied that he was still interested in search, but the current economy wasn't going to allow him to continue this specific project. "In a different economy, we would continue to fund Wikia Search indefinitely," he wrote. "Its something I care about deeply. I will return to again and again in my career to search, either as an investor, a contributor, a donor, or a cheerleader."