Fandom.com vs Wikipedia.org

Fandom (also called Wikia before October 2016) is a wiki hosting service and domain operated by Fandom, Inc. organization (formerly known as Wikia, Inc.), a for-profit Delaware company founded in October 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. 

The name of the project was changed to Wikia on March 27, 2006. In the month before the move, Wikia declared a US$4 million venture capital investment from Bessemer Venture Partners and First Round Capital.Nine months after the fact, Amazon.com invested US$10 million in Series B financing. 

By September 2006, it had roughly 1,500 wikis in 48 languages. Over time, Wikia has joined previously independent wikis, for example, LyricWiki, Nukapedia, Uncyclopedia, and WoWWiki. Gil Penchina described Wikia from the get-go as "the remainder of the library and magazine rack" to Wikipedia's encyclopedia. The material has likewise been described as informal, and often bordering on entertainment, allowing the importing of maps, YouTube videos, and other non-traditional wiki material. 

Starting at 2018, it is headed by Perkins Miller as CEO. Fandom uses MediaWiki, the open-source wiki software used by Wikipedia. Fandom, Inc. gets its pay from advertising and sold content, publishing most user-provided text under copyleft licenses. The company likewise runs the associated Fandom editorial project, offering pop-culture, and gaming news. 

Most Fandom wikis are hosted under the domain fandom.com, but a few, especially those that focus on subjects other than media franchises, are hosted under Wikia.org. In 2018, Fandom was acquired by TPG Capital and Jon Miller through Integrated Media Co.

Wikipedia, Inc. started with its initially edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Its mechanical and calculated underpinnings originate before this; the earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates in 1993, and the idea of a free-as-in-freedom online encyclopedia (as particular from simple open source) was proposed by Richard Stallman in December 2000.

Significantly, Stallman's idea explicitly incorporated that no central organization should control editing. This trademark enormously diverged from contemporary digital encyclopedias, for example, Microsoft Encarta, Encyclopædia Britannica, and even Bomis' Nupedia, which was Wikipedia's direct predecessor. In 2001, the licence for Nupedia was changed to GFDL, and Wales and Sanger launched Wikipedia using the idea and technology of a wiki pioneered in 1995 by Ward Cunningham.

Initially, Wikipedia was planned to supplement Nupedia, an online encyclopedia project exclusively by experts, by giving extra draft articles and thoughts for it. In practice, Wikipedia immediately surpassed Nupedia, becoming a worldwide project in multiple languages and inspiring a wide range of other online reference projects. 

Wikipedia's overall monthly readership is approximately 495 million. Worldwide in September 2018, WMF Labs counted 15.5 billion page views for the month. According to comScore, Wikipedia gets more than 117 million monthly extraordinary visitors from the United States alone.