One of the most prolific categories of wiki use is the TV show fan wiki. Freebie wiki hosts Wetpaint and Wikia have practically built their business on them. All of the eight sites highlighted on Wetpaint’s home page are TV show fan sites, and Wikia has made an art of Top 10 entertainment mashup lists as pointers into various TV and movie wikis. As somebody who doesn’t watch much TV, I am amazed at the devotion and time fans pour into these often gargantuan sites. It appears that having an active fan wiki has become a marketing must-have for network television.

Wikia sent out a press release today boasting that it’s entertainment wiki hub has surpassed Entertainment Weekly’s traditional (non-wiki) entertainment news site by almost 4.5 million visitors per month. The release highlights Lostpedia, the fan site for ABC’s LOST, which houses “more than 5,000 pages of content chronicling every detail of every episode and every character of the show.” But it was this quote from the release about the passion exhibited by site contributors that got me thinking:

That passion makes Wikia Entertainment Network wikis an ideal way for brands to reach and interact with people who care deeply about their franchise.

So who is reaching, Brands or Fans? The press release is aimed squarely at TV show brand owners - the marketing engines of network television. What role then does show marketing staff really play in these sites? Is it complicity, allowing their brand and intellectual property to be plastered all over these sites and see the benefit rather than the sticky copyright protection issues? Or are the marketers leading the charge, building the sites for new shows and using them as launching pads for nascent fan communities?

The beauty of wikis is the semi-transparency of contribution. I decided to do a little poking around on a random sample. How about Dancing With The Stars? This show has a Wetpaint fan site documenting in detail each episode: who danced with who, what the scores were, yada yada yada. Looking at the page for the most recent episode, there are two contributors. The page was created and the bulk of its content was populated by the site’s creator, whose profile icon features Tom Bergeron (the show’s host). Another user who appears to be a big TV fan then made several edits, but the Tom Bergeron impersonator is responsible for the bulk of the site’s substantial content. I sent a message to him asking whether he’s affiliated with the show. I’ll update this if I hear back from him. I also checked the WHOIS record for the site’s domain, dwts.org. It’s registered through Domains by Proxy, so there is no ownership data in the WHOIS record.

Of course, ABC has its own site for the show with a low-tech but active community section featuring forums and a he/she live blog strumming up viewer commentary. The site doesn’t get into the level of detail that the wiki does, with a full accounting of show history and score data. Notably, it also doesn’t link to the Wetpaint site.

So if there is network involvement, they’re being careful to mask it. My guess is that the relationship is more complicity than driver’s seat involvement. After all, people love to be reporters, and these fan wikis allow anyone to become a publisher and news source just by watching their favorite TV show.  It will be interesting to see if network television begins to take more ownership of these sites as they eclipse official sites as the defacto web resource for television shows.