Wikia Launches Fandom, a New Place to Get Your Nerd On

One of the largest entertainment fan sites around is spawning its own sequel: Fandom.

Fandom is an outgrowth of Wikia, a site where the vast majority of the content is created by devotees who provide an encyclopedic accounting of the topic — be it video games like Fallout, television shows like Marvel’s “Daredevil” on Netflix or movies like “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”

Wikia’s millions of pages of content provide synopses plus deep dives on plot, characters, timelines, trivia and more. Thousands of users spent untold hours building out these comprehensive guides, Wales said.

But Fandom breaks from the Wikia format. It’s a pure media destination, with an editorial staff writing original stories, creating videos and picking content from elsewhere on the Web as well as from Wikia’s 345,000 communities. Fans, who Jimmy Wales, founder and chairman of Wikia and Wikipedia, describes as the ultimate subject-matter experts, will also submit contributed works.

“We have this passionate group of people,” said Wales. “Now they’ve got a voice.”

The new media site will provide original videos, news and features, as well as curated content — all with a focus on the entertainment-obsessed fan. The site is envisioned as a one-stop shop for all things pop culture, encompassing TV shows, movies, video games and more.

“It basically puts fans first,” said Wales, who is expected to announce the launch of Fandom Monday morning at the IAB annual leadership meeting in Palm Desert, Calif.

There’s no shortage of places online where the most passionate fans of a particular TV show or movie franchise can express that enthusiasm — from the sprawling marketplace of ideas that is Reddit to social media platforms like Facebook or Tumblr.

ComScore’s industry analyst Andrew Lipsman said Wikia is hoping to capitalize by drawing all that fan interest to one place. It’s building off of a large, established base that the measurement firm estimates at around 40 million monthly users in the U.S.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.