La Frikipedia

» see frikipedia.es as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

La Frikipedia went up on 3 October 2005, built by a user calling himself Krusher and run under an owner account named Nexo. It described itself as the extremely serious encyclopedia, which tells you the register straight away. It was a Spanish-language parody of Wikipedia, licensed GFDL like the thing it was making fun of, and it paid for itself on donations plus a little merchandise. You had to register to edit. By the end it held around 11,230 articles.

It had the problems every open wiki has. Pages got blanked and insults went in, and the cleanup was sloppy enough that obscenities sometimes survived with a line struck through them instead of being deleted, which meant you could still read exactly what they said. The admins were permissive by policy and deleted articles anyway when one failed the rules, and a share of the userbase resented that too.

What killed it was not vandalism. Early in 2006 the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, the Spanish collecting society that had spent a decade becoming the most disliked institution on the Spanish internet, sued the person responsible for the site.

~ the case file ~

~ the sgae years ~

The suit named Vicente Herrera and claimed insults rather than copyright, asking for somewhere between nine and twelve thousand euros. On 3 February 2006 La Frikipedia closed over it. Pedro Farré, SGAE's director of institutional relations, said publicly that the society would drop the case if Herrera pulled the content and apologized for it.

A support campaign started almost immediately, and Herrera opened a page collecting two and five euro donations through PayPal against lawyers and whatever penalty landed. The site came back on 26 February under an agreement with SGAE that it would not name the society anywhere on its pages. Spanish users hated that condition loudly enough that it closed again within hours. It reopened in test mode that June and properly on 20 October 2007, by which point the gag was understood as a measure for the duration of the case rather than a permanent surrender.

On 8 November 2007 the Audiencia Nacional in Madrid confirmed the ruling. Herrera owed six hundred euros in damages to SGAE and to Farré personally, plus court costs. That is the entire financial outcome of the most famous lawsuit the Spanish parody internet ever produced, and it took almost two years to arrive.

~ the articles that emigrated ~

A joke wiki is the least portable object on the internet. Every entry leans on a shared reference set, usually a national one, and a Spanish gag about a collecting society or a regional politician does not survive the trip into another language. I was online for all eleven of its years and never once landed on it, and the reason was the language rather than the reach.

When the 2006 closure hit, readers pulled articles back out of Google and Yahoo caches and moved them into the Spanish branch of Uncyclopedia, which grew fast enough on the rescued material that the project split off as Inciclopedia. The SGAE article went with them. So when the site finally closed for good on 1 January 2016, saying it had been suffocated by threats and complaints arriving practically every week and could no longer pay for itself, the jokes had already had a decade to relocate. Inciclopedia is still there.

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