Galaxiki

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

~ the last words ~

A million solar systems, and every one of them had a page you could edit. That was the pitch, printed across the front of the site in red: a science fiction galaxy that anyone can edit.

Galaxiki went up in 2007, built by Jos F. Kirps in Luxembourg and run by a non-profit rather than a company. The galaxy was generated, not drawn, and it turned in real time in a viewer on the homepage, with a crosshair you could drag across a spiral arm and a readout that would tell you what you had landed on. Yellow dwarf star. Seven planets. Click it and you were on its page.

The awards came quickly, which is what happened to a novel web idea in 2007. Yahoo made it website of the day, and About.com and Pocket-lint did the same. Linux Journal ran it as project of the week, and it took one of the Web 2.0 Awards. The site kept those badges on its front page for the rest of its life, all fourteen years of it.

~ the record ~

~ how the galaxy worked ~

The galaxy itself was generated rather than authored, a million systems laid down by the software before any member arrived. What members got was the right to claim one and change it. You could edit the physics of a planet, rename a moon, and hang as much text off the system as you wanted to write. Owning a star cost nothing and the front page said so in a green button.

The clever part is that this gave a shared fictional universe a coordinate system. Two writers working on unrelated stories were working in the same galaxy at known distances from one another, and the wiki held the canon. Nobody had to agree on anything except where the stars were, because the stars were already there.

~ the writers ~

What grew on top of it was collaborative science fiction, a lot of it, with the plots worked out in advance in the site's forums and then published as stories against the systems they took place in. Kirps calls those writers the reason the platform worked at all, and his closing note on the site thanks them by name as a group before anything else.

Luxembourg is not a country I have ever had a reason to look at on the internet, and a hobby sci-fi wiki in English run out of it was never going to cross my path in 2008. I came to it off a list of dead sites that carried no closure date next to the name, which is how it ended up needing research at all.

~ the day it stopped ~

The end is documented by the person who ended it, which is rare. Activity had been close to zero for three years. Over the same period the site was under continuous attack. Denial of service attempts and SQL injection probes arrived steadily, and spam bots worked the forum and the blog around the clock. None of it ever got through. That is the detail worth sitting with: the attacks all failed, and they killed the site anyway, because a volunteer was spending his evenings defending a galaxy nobody was writing in.

He turned it off in the second half of 2021. galaxiki.org still answers today with a page describing what used to be there, which ends on a line that has been sitting unresolved for five years now: there are backups of all of the content, and maybe there will be a read-only version of the site one day.

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