Deletionpedia

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

~ the eulogy ~

I missed Deletionpedia completely. It ran for seven months in 2008 and then came back for another nine years under a different owner, and I never once typed the address. Reading it up now, from a site that is itself nothing but a list of things that stopped existing, is an odd angle to come at it from.

The idea was a wikimorgue. English Wikipedia deletes articles constantly, through speedy deletion for the obvious cases and through the deletion discussions where editors argue about whether a subject clears the notability bar. Once an article goes, only administrators can see what was there. Deletionpedia ran a bot against the deletion log and kept a public copy of the article, plus the stated rationale and a link to the discussion that killed it.

That last part is what made it more than a mirror. A dead article on its own is just orphaned text. A dead article with the reason for its death attached is evidence, and for a few years this was the only place outside the administrator interface where you could look at the shape of what Wikipedia was throwing out.

~ the dossier ~

~ the war it came out of ~

2008 was the height of the deletionist and inclusionist fight. One side held that an encyclopedia is defined by what it refuses to carry. The other held that storage is cheap and a stub about a village band hurts nobody. Neither side was being unreasonable, which is why the argument lasted years and produced an enormous amount of process.

Deletionpedia landed in the middle of it as a piece of evidence that both sides could point at. The Wall Street Journal wrote about it and so did Ars Technica, and the coverage nearly always framed it the same way: here is the pile of things Wikipedia decided were not worth keeping, go look at the pile yourself and decide who was right.

~ how the wikimorgue worked ~

The first version was live between February and September 2008 and pulled in roughly sixty three thousand articles in that window. It was not selective. Anything the deletion log carried got archived, which meant vanity pages and half-written hoaxes sitting right next to genuine casualties of an over-strict notability reading.

Archiving stopped long before the site did. The last log it took from Wikipedia was dated 14 June 2012, after which the thing sat there as a static snapshot for another decade, still serving pages nobody was adding to.

~ the second one ~

On Christmas Eve 2013 a new owner named Kasper Souren reregistered the domain and started the whole thing over. Version two ran considerably longer than version one and got considerably bigger: 91,250 content pages by February 2022, with close to a quarter of a million edits behind them and around four thousand registered accounts.

Then in February 2023 it stopped answering, with no notice anyone recorded. Today deletionpedia.org does not resolve at all, which is a harder death than a parked page. Archive Team took a copy of the original in 2011 and put it in the Internet Archive, so the wikimorgue is now reachable only through a bigger morgue.

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