Anarchopedia

» see anarchopedia.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Anarchopedia threw out the neutral point of view on purpose. Wikipedia's first rule is that an article does not take a side; Anarchopedia's founding text said the opposite, that it would express an anarchist view rather than a neutral one, and that the encyclopedia was itself meant to be an act of direct action rather than a description of other people's. Everything else about the project followed from that one decision.

Miloš Rančić, a Serbian anarchist, started it on 30 September 2004. It ran the same MediaWiki software as Wikipedia but was a separate installation and a separate project, with a wiki per language sitting on subdomains: eng, fra, deu, spa, ita, srp and others. The subject list leaned exactly where you would expect, toward revolutionary syndicalism and squatting and radical ecology and free software, and it also became a shelter for material Wikipedia had deleted, often reposted with an argument against Wikipedia's rules attached. There was no editorial board. Registered users who stuck around got the ability to protect and delete pages, and decisions were supposed to come out of consensus rather than a hierarchy.

Which worked until it did not. From 2009 new articles could only be created by registered accounts, because the open form had been overrun by spam. The technical problems that followed were never fixed, and the Italian write-up of the project is blunt about why: users attributed it to the unwillingness of whoever held the server to deal with it. The site went dark for long stretches and came back, without ever really resuming. I came to this one from a list of dead domains rather than from anarchism. The people who wrote the articles never had access to the machine the articles lived on.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the api says in 2026 ~

The wikis are still up, which is why this is filed as dormant rather than dead. You can query them. The hub at meta.anarchopedia.org reports 4,248 pages, 27,572 edits, 2,547 uploaded images and 31,998 registered accounts, with 19 administrators. The French wiki reports 6,194 pages and 41,498 edits across 19,789 accounts. The Spanish one reports 3,618 pages and 25,154 edits. Every single one of them reports the same number of active users: zero.

The software underneath is a museum. MediaWiki 1.26.2, which was current in 2015, running on PHP 5.6 and MySQL 5.5 on a Debian release that went out of support years ago, behind nginx 1.6.2. The English wiki takes between fifteen and twenty-five seconds to return its front page and its API answers 502. The machine lives on network space registered to Calyx, a nonprofit provider.

~ the italian split ~

The Italians left. Faced with breakage that was not getting fixed, a group of Italian editors stood up a separate site at anarcopedia.org, Italian only rather than multilingual, and carried the old entries across. That one answers in milliseconds in 2026, which is a fork of a fork of Wikipedia still serving its readers.

~ the last real edits ~

February 2016 is when the writing stops. The final content edits on the French wiki are not content at all: three new sections on the Post-anarchisme talk page with headings like "goodday comrades" and "Hello all people", plus one asking where to get cheap XRumer, which is the software people use to post exactly those messages. The German wiki's last edit is 3 February 2016. The Spanish wiki stops in the same weeks.

After that there is one more flicker. On 6 November 2017 somebody with access edited the hub's Monobook stylesheet several times in an evening and touched its Italian front page, then stopped. That is the last recorded edit anywhere on Anarchopedia. The front page of the hub still carries a last-modified date of 4 June 2016 and serves it to anyone who asks, nine years later, from a server that nobody is watching.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »