Ok this is not very new (12/11/06) but an interesting one - Amazon joins the existing investors in Wikia and gives the startup way more room to play:

Wikia, Inc., the leading wiki site for information on thousands of topics written by a community of contributors, today announced it has completed Series B financing with a strategic investment from Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN). Amazon.com is the Sole investor in Wikia's second round of funding and is Wikia's first corporate investor.

PEWire reportsit was a total of $10 million that Amazon invested.

Right now www.wikia.com looks less about user generated content and more about content that was fed by professional editors into the system.

Wikia is a commercial project started by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wale, where the company or preferably in future users start a topic (i.e. the '24' TV show) and users then extend the content. There is no compensation for this - it just gives you a space to connect with other fans.

I counted around 2000 of such existing topics in all languages that wikia supports (the same languages as wikipedia).

Wikia tries what many have failed to do - make wikis the place to exchange ideas bound to a particular topics. It takes a long time and many very dedicated initial editors (paid or not) to build critical mass and it can be terribly difficult to maintain a minimum quality. But as wikipedia has shown it's possible and I'm curious how Jimmy will pull it off this time.