ScribbleWiki

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

~ the last words ~

In June 2007 a nineteen-year-old in Vancouver named Simon Koldyk put a MediaWiki install behind a signup form and started handing out free wikis. He was the only full-time person on it and he paid for it himself, out of money from a web company he had already sold. The business ran under Linger Media Company and the plan was the standard one for that moment: hand out free wikis to the public, then sell the paying version to the businesses who noticed.

It worked faster than that plan usually works. By early 2008 ScribbleWiki was hosting over fourteen thousand active wikis and had signed more than a hundred corporate clients, and it placed sixteenth on the January 2008 Vancouver Start-up Index. The front page in May of that year called it a free online collaboration tool and explained what a wiki was to people who did not know, with an example about organizing a camping trip. By August the pitch had hardened into something aimed at the people with budgets: simple wiki hosting, IT staff optional, thirty-day free trial on the Small Business Package.

The free side filled up with what free wiki hosting always fills up with. The subdomains that survive in the crawl logs are a cross-section of 2008: a wiki about Aqua Teen Hunger Force, one about mancala, one about Call of Duty, one about shock sites, one about VoIP, a Japanese one, an anti-Wikipedia one, a youth climate pledge. Their own support wiki lived at tictaktoe.scribblewiki.com, which is also where the logo came from: the word SCRIBBLE hand-drawn above a scratched-out noughts-and-crosses grid.

Then it ended, and the ending is barely documented anywhere, because the people best placed to write it up had just lost their wikis.

~ the record ~

~ fourteen thousand wikis ~

A wiki farm in 2007 was a particular kind of promise. The pitch was that you did not need a server or an admin to start a reference work; you needed a subject and some patience. Wikia was doing it at scale, Wetpaint was doing it for people who found MediaWiki syntax frightening, JotSpot had been doing it for business until Google bought them, and in between there were dozens of small ones run by one or two people.

What almost none of them offered, and what ScribbleWiki did not offer either, was a working export. The whole value of a wiki is that it is a shared document many people have poured hours into, and the whole risk of a hosted wiki is that the document lives on one company's disk. ArchiveTeam's entry on ScribbleWiki is three sentences long and the operative one is this: there are no dumps, presumably lost.

~ the crash ~

The only contemporaneous account of what happened comes from one of the wikis that got out in time. Mancala World had started on ScribbleWiki, then took an invitation from Angela Beesley and moved itself to Wikia over six days between 26 September and 1 October 2008. Its own history page records the reason it is glad it hurried: ScribbleWiki was shut down two months later due to a server crash.

The archive agrees with the shape of that. Hosted ScribbleWiki subdomains were still answering 200 through late October 2008, with the last one caught on the 26th. After that the crawler finds nothing at all on the domain for over four months. The next time anything answers is March 2009, and by then it is not a wiki farm.

Eighteen months of a one-person company with fourteen thousand wikis on it, and the thing that ended it was hardware with no backup behind it. For a service whose entire product was other people's writing, that is the worst available failure, and it is the reason the ArchiveTeam page exists at all.

~ the domain afterwards ~

By 6 March 2009 scribblewiki.com was serving a WordPress MU install. Not the wikis and not a notice: a multi-user blog host sitting on the same domain, offering to let you create a new blog. The crawler captured it in the act, and the captured URLs are the part that stings.

They are all of the form wp-signup.php with a blog name attached, and the names are the dead wikis. aquateenwiki. imvuwiki. wikiofgor. donjon. lumeniki. twistedfate. Each one is the old subdomain of a wiki that no longer exists, now resolving to a form inviting you to register a blog under that name. For a few weeks in the spring of 2009 the addresses of fourteen thousand collaborative documents were available again, as empty blog slots.

The domain stopped being even that. By 2011 it was a parked page of sponsored search results, and the server still answered requests for the old logo file by handing back a JavaScript tracker. Today it 301s to a quiz site. The one thing from ScribbleWiki that definitely survived is the scribbled logo, held by ArchiveTeam at 500 pixels wide, on a page that records the rest of it as lost.

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