Heroes Wiki

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

~ the eulogy ~

Heroes Wiki opened on 10 October 2006, two weeks after NBC put a show on air about ordinary people who discovered they could stop time or paint the future. The premise generated homework. There were too many characters to hold in your head, the timeline forked and re-forked, and the writers kept planting details that only paid off a season later. Somebody installed MediaWiki and started taking notes, then a few hundred people joined in.

It turned into a real reference. By 28 June 2010 the site held more than 5,500 articles and had served over 157 million page views. About 9,400 people had registered accounts to write them, which for a wiki about a single television series is a small town's worth of unpaid archivists.

Heroes traveled well. It ran in Turkey the way American series ran here in that decade, late and in translation and mostly consumed off a hard drive, and I was on TTNet broadband at university while the first two seasons went out. The show I remember. The wiki I never touched, because keeping the continuity straight in English was somebody else's hobby and they were very good at it.

~ the dossier ~

~ when the network paid the fans ~

On 18 October 2008, NBC formally partnered with Heroes Wiki. The network started directing anyone who wanted a wiki about the show to that address, and it funded the site directly in exchange for running ads on it.

Look at what every other studio was doing in 2008 and this reads as an accident. Rights holders of that era either ignored fan encyclopedias or sent takedown letters over episode screenshots, and the ambitious ones cloned the whole thing onto a corporate domain nobody visited. NBC looked at a volunteer project that already had better coverage of its own show than its own marketing department did and decided to pay the hosting bill. The wiki stayed independent enough to keep writing about plot holes.

~ the slow fade ~

The show was cancelled in 2010 after four seasons. A wiki can outlive its subject, and this one did for a decade, because a finished series still needs a place where the details are written down. But a finished series does not generate new editors, and the 2015 miniseries revival did not bring the audience back.

The closure notice in June 2020 gave the reason plainly: traffic had dropped far enough that keeping the site up was no longer sustainable. The last archived capture of heroeswiki.com is from 31 May 2020. The domain resolves to nothing now.

~ what an archive is worth ~

A fan wiki is a strange asset. Nobody owns it in the way anybody wants to own things, and its value sits entirely in the accumulated labor of people who were not paid for the first two years. It also becomes most useful at exactly the moment its subject stops being popular enough to fund it. Heroes Wiki solved that problem for twelve years by being useful to a network, and the moment it stopped being useful to the network it was back to being nine thousand people's homework with a server bill attached.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »