Wikia has unveiled Wikia Maps, its new collaborative mapping tool

Wikia, the social universe of fandom and the ultimate source for powerful and relevant pop culture expertise, today announces the debut of Wikia Maps, a product designed to enhance Wikia’s collaborative chronicles for fans, by fans. Wikia’s fan insider group, Community Council, has been able to beta test Wikia Maps until today when the product becomes widely available at maps.wikia.com. Uniquely designed to map game play as well as concert posters, body armor, characters or runway fashion, Wikia Maps fuel fans’ creative expression with fully-customizable, image-based, interactive maps that anyone can create or contribute to on the Wikia platform. Maps will be available to view on each Wikia site and across mobile devices, with increased mobile editing functionality to be introduced in coming months.

Launched by Jimmy Wales way back in 2006, Wikia may not be as well-known as its not-for-profit big brother Wikipedia. But it still attracts north of 110 million unique visitors per month around the world, meaning it’s very much a colossal digital beast in its own right. Wikipedia is a donation-reliant, crowdsourced encyclopedia founded by Wales more than a decade ago, but Wikia is his money-making, Web-hosting service for crowdsourced wikis – free for fans, readers and editors, and funded by advertising. Wikia packs an enormous content punch, and it’s social to boot with users collaborating, discussing and consuming information and data-points on just about any topic you can imagine, from gluten-free recipes to all-things movies. You can read all about it here. Now, Wikia is set to unveil a brand new product called Wikia Maps which will lets fans of any topic create their own themed maps. Star Wars fans, for example, could (and evidently have done) collaboratively create a Millennium Falcon cutaway by placing markers or pins against the image, while organizing different views of these annotations via filters (see for yourself by clicking ‘Filters’ on the map below). Using the iFrame code provided, these maps can be embedded across the Web. You can add any note you wish to the markers to provide more information, such as: “This ladder was used by Luke Skywalker and Han Solo to reach the gun turrets at the top and bottom of the Millennium Falcon.”