glbtq.com

» see glbtq.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

glbtq.com sits in a part of the internet I can read about but was never inside. It was an English-language American reference work, published out of Chicago for readers who mostly found it through library guides and search results, and I was a Turkish engineering student with no particular reason to have landed on it. This one is written from the record.

The project started in 2000. A publisher named Andrew Wikholm, who went by Wik, decided that the largest encyclopedia of queer culture and history did not exist yet and set about commissioning one. More than two years of writing happened before a single page went public. When the site launched in March 2003 it already carried over a million words, which is not how websites normally arrive.

The editorial side was academic and the writing showed it. Claude J. Summers, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Michigan at Dearborn, served as general editor. Ted-Larry Pebworth copy edited and Linda Rapp assisted. The encyclopedia was organized into three departments, and by the end it held nearly two thousand entries running to 2.2 million words from more than three hundred and fifty contributors.

~ the chronicle ~

~ who wrote it ~

It matters that this was commissioned rather than crowdsourced. In March 2003 Wikipedia was two years old and thin on exactly this material, and most of what existed on the open web about queer history was personal writing rather than reference writing. glbtq.com hired subject specialists, gave them signed bylines and let them run long on figures that general encyclopedias had handled in a paragraph or not at all.

That produced a strange object: a work with the tone and the sourcing of a print reference set, sitting at a free address with an ad banner across the top. Universities linked to it from their research guides. It got cited in papers. For a decade it was the thing you were pointed at first.

~ what paid for it ~

Advertising, and only advertising. No subscription tier, no paywall, no university press behind it, no foundation grant keeping the lights on. In 2003 that arrangement made sense, because a niche site with a devoted audience could sell its own banners at rates that covered a small editorial payroll.

Then the rate for a banner fell through the floor. Ad networks consolidated and buying moved to programmatic exchanges that priced a specialist reader at the same rate as anybody else. The money that had once paid three hundred and fifty contributors turned into money that could not pay one. The site did not run out of readers. It ran out of the only revenue line it had.

~ what got buried with it ~

The lesson underneath this grave is that a specialist encyclopedia is not replaceable by a general one. Wikipedia in 2015 was enormous and still did not have signed 3,000-word essays by an emeritus English professor on minor nineteenth century poets. When glbtq.com went dark, every citation pointing at it broke at once, which is the part that hurts a reference work more than losing traffic.

~ where it went ~

This one has a better ending than most. ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, one of the oldest collections of its kind in the United States and now part of the USC libraries, took the whole encyclopedia and republished it at glbtqarchive.com, where the articles are still readable. The content survived the business that made it, which almost never happens.

The original address did not fare as well. glbtq.com resolves today to a digital marketing agency for the home services industry. Two decades of commissioned scholarship, and the domain ended up with somebody who wanted the search rankings.

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