Vinismo

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

~ the obit ~

i missed this one on the simplest grounds available. i do not have a wine hobby and have never kept a note about a bottle in my life. A free and complete guide to every producing region on earth was addressed to a person with a cellar and an opinion about it, and that has never been me at any point.

What makes it worth a grave is who built it. Evan Prodromou had already made Wikitravel. A year after Vinismo he started the company behind Identi.ca, the microblogging service that became StatusNet and then GNU social, and he later ended up co-editing ActivityPub, the standard underneath Mastodon and everything else federated. Vinismo sits in the middle of that run. It was founded in april 2007 in Montreal with Nicolas Ritoux alongside him and opened to the public on 24 july 2007.

The license was Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada, and that is the part that matters most. Anybody could take the whole database and put it back up somewhere else under their own name, edited or untouched, as long as they said where it came from. That was not a risk the project tolerated. It was the design. A wine guide that anybody can walk away with is a wine guide nobody can hold hostage, which is a strange thing to build a startup on and exactly the thing this founder kept building.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the form ~

The genuinely novel piece was the interface. Vinismo was the first site anywhere to use the form extension to MediaWiki, which put a set of labeled fields in front of a contributor instead of a box full of markup. A person who knew a great deal about a producer in the Loire and nothing at all about wiki syntax could fill in the labeled fields and get a properly structured article out the other end. Everything wikis have done since to lower that barrier is downstream of this idea, and in 2007 almost nobody was doing it.

It worked well enough to accumulate around 35,000 articles from more than 600 authors by may 2010, across three language versions. What it could not solve was the objection a Montreal blogger raised two months after launch, which was that wine writing is subjective and a wiki is a machine for producing agreement. Facts about a region will hold still. A verdict on a vintage will not, and the format has no answer for that except an edit war. The critique was correct, and the site never really got past being a structured list of things that Wikipedia also had.

~ the cpanel page ~

The last archived capture of a working Vinismo is from 6 january 2009, nine kilobytes of MediaWiki with a custom skin named after the site. The page source carries a revision id of 51152, and because MediaWiki numbers revisions across the whole install rather than per page, that is a floor on how many edits the wiki had taken by then. Captures in january and september 2010 come back as redirects. The article count of 35,000 is dated may 2010, so the thing was clearly still running while the crawler was seeing nothing useful.

Then on 27 february 2011 the address returned 424 bytes. Not an error page, not a farewell, not a redirect to anywhere. Just a meta refresh pointing at a path called cgi-sys slash defaultwebpage dot cgi, which is the placeholder cPanel serves when a hosting account exists and nothing has been pointed at it. That is what the Wikipedia sentence about february 2011 is actually describing: not a shutdown announcement, because there never was one, but a wiki that stopped being served while the hosting bill was apparently still being paid.

It sat like that for years. Captures through 2013 are the same few hundred bytes of nothing. Today vinismo.com answers on neither scheme, so at some point even the hosting account went. Thirty five thousand articles, licensed specifically so that anybody could keep a copy, and no mirror of them survives at the name.

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