Rigveda Wiki

» see rigvedawiki.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

This was a wiki by and for Korean-speaking fandom, which is a crowd I have never been part of and a language I cannot read a line of. So the pages are closed to me. The mechanism is not, and the mechanism is why this one is worth writing down: a site made entirely of unpaid writing died because of what its own terms of service said about who owned that writing.

It started on 1 March 2007 as Angelhalo Wiki, shortened by everyone to Enha Wiki, and took the name Rigveda Wiki in 2012. What it collected was everything the Korean web wanted described at length, from games and animation and idol groups down to slang and local internet incidents, written with far looser rules than an encyclopedia keeps. It had its own dialect of formatting, including a strikethrough convention used for saying a thing while pretending not to.

There was a strange fact underneath its popularity. Most readers never touched the official site. They arrived through the Enha Wiki Mirror, an unofficial copy that ranked well on the Korean search engines while the original ranked badly, and plenty of them did not know the site behind the mirror existed. By April 2015 the wiki held more than 270,000 articles.

~ the record ~

~ the fork ~

March 2015 is when it came apart. Users found articles that had been copied out of English Wikipedia without attribution, which put the site's own handling of licenses under a microscope, and by early April people were reading the terms of service closely. Those terms claimed that contributions belonged to the operator exclusively. Every person who had spent years typing into the box learned that the box had a clause in it.

The response was fast and total. On 17 April 2015 Namuwiki was set up on a copy of the database, legally, because the content carried a Creative Commons license that permitted exactly this. Within weeks almost the entire editing community had moved. The site went dark from 25 April to 17 May and came back with editing locked down to registered users, which mattered to nobody by then. A Seoul court later held that the copyright sat with the contributors rather than with the platform, since they had been paid nothing for it.

~ what got buried with it ~

The shell ran on for another six years. In late 2021 it was renamed to Rigveda Mirror and editing was switched off entirely, leaving a read-only copy of a corpus its authors had already taken with them. Then the server broke, the administrator said it would be back, and it was not. The last capture anyone has is from 11 December 2022, and by the first days of 2023 the address answered nothing at all. It still answers nothing.

Namuwiki went on to become one of the most visited sites in Korea, running on text this wiki started. That is the unusual ending here. Most community sites die and take their archive with them, and readers are left with dead links. This one kept none of its people and lost none of its writing, because a license clause written years earlier let the whole library walk out under its own terms while the building stayed behind and rotted.

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