LISWiki

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

~ the last words ~

This one belonged to librarians, and I have never been one. It is a narrow world with its own vocabulary and a professional literature that engineers almost never read, and in 2005 a piece of that world decided to find out what a wiki was good for. The answer took fourteen years to arrive and it was disappointing.

John Hubbard was a web librarian at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. He already ran LISNews and Library Link of the Day, so he was the sort of person who kept small useful things running for a profession that appreciated them quietly. On 30 June 2005 he registered liswiki.org, put MediaWiki on it, made a handful of edits so the place would not be empty, and advertised it to other librarians.

The premise was reasonable. Wikipedia would not carry articles on every cataloging standard or every integrated library system, and the profession had plenty of knowledge that lived in nobody's head twice. A niche encyclopedia run under the GNU Free Documentation License, edited by the people who actually did the work. Librarians are trained in exactly this. Organizing things so a stranger can find them later is literally what the degree is in.

~ the record ~

~ the tragedy of the non-commons ~

That is Hubbard's own phrase, the title he gave his write-up when it was over, and it inverts the thing everybody quotes. The tragedy of the commons is a shared resource destroyed by too many people taking from it. What happened here was the opposite shape: a shared resource that nobody took from and nobody added to, sitting open and unused until its owner got tired of paying for the hosting.

Fourteen years produced 1,421 pages. For comparison, a single active Wikipedia editor can create that many stubs in a year. The wiki never developed the thing that makes wikis work, which is a group of regulars who show up often enough to fix each other's mistakes. Without that, every page is a draft somebody abandoned, and a reader who finds an out-of-date page learns not to come back.

~ the last edit ~

The front page carries its own timestamp at the bottom, the way every MediaWiki page does, and it reads 22 January 2014 at 10:23. The closure notice went up on 11 March 2019 at 07:12 UTC. Between those two dates sit five years and change in which the single most visited page on the site was not touched once. By the time the notice went up, the wiki had been quiet for longer than most wikis live.

~ what it still serves ~

liswiki.org has not gone away. The root path answers with a server error, but the article paths still work in 2026, and the main page still carries the sentence announcing that the wiki will be closing on 1 July 2019. Seven years after the date it describes, the notice is still the first thing a visitor reads. Nobody took it down, because that requires somebody to log in.

Archive Team ran a crawl of the whole thing in 2019 anyway, which was the right call even though the site turned out not to need rescuing. A read-only wiki left running on a working host is the most durable form a dead website can take, and also the one that most resembles an actual library after hours, with a catalog accurate as of some date in the past and nobody at the desk.

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