Wetpaint

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

~ the obit ~

wetpaint sat in the part of the web 2.0 boom where the bet was that wikipedia's success would generalize. ben elowitz and his co-founders launched it from seattle in october 2005, originally under the name wikisphere, and renamed it wetpaint in december with a fresh 5.25 million series a. the product was a hosted wiki you could create in under a minute, with a wysiwyg toolbar instead of wikipedia's double-bracket markup, and a permission system loose enough that you could leave a fan wiki fully open or lock it down to a small group.

the audience that adopted it was not the encyclopedia crowd. it was teenagers running fan wikis. every mid-2000s tv show with a passionate online following had a wetpaint wiki: lost, gossip girl, the office, glee, twilight, naruto, anime in general. it was the place where you wrote up character bios and episode summaries before fandom (then called wikia) absorbed the same niche.

by 2009 the company had taken 39 million in venture funding and was trying to pivot. the wiki farm got renamed "wikis by wetpaint" and moved to wetpaintcentral.com, while the main wetpaint.com domain relaunched as an entertainment news site with tv recaps and celebrity gossip. viggle, an entertainment-rewards startup, bought what remained in december 2012. the wiki-hosting side was sold off to wikifoundry in 2013, taken offline in late 2014, and the entertainment blog kept publishing until 2018 before going stagnant and finally dying mid 2020.

i was never in the wetpaint zone. by 2007 i was finishing computer engineering at university with department mediawiki for collaborative notes and frmtr / donanimhaber for the rest of my online life. the fan-wiki habit in turkey ran through individual blogspot pages and forum threads on dizifilmi-style sites rather than english-language hosted wikis. wetpaint was specifically a us / uk teenage-fandom platform, and the cultural moment it captured does not translate cleanly to my own years online.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it worked ~

the editor did the heavy lifting. you typed text into a panel that already looked like the published page, clicked save, and the wiki was live. links were autocompleted as you typed. images were dragged in. there was no syntax to teach a thirteen-year-old before they could write a character bio for the office's pam beesly. the permission model could be set per-wiki or per-page, with a public option and a private option.

the social-network layer added in march 2008 was the move that mattered most for fan communities. profiles, friend lists, threaded comments under every page, an activity feed showing who edited what. it made wetpaint less wiki and more wiki-flavored forum, which is exactly what fandom communities actually wanted.

~ the cracks ~

wikia (later fandom) was doing the same thing with a much wider catalog and much more aggressive seo. by 2010 a google search for any tv-show wiki was already more likely to return a wikia url than a wetpaint one. wetpaint's response was to pivot the main domain away from wikis entirely toward entertainment news, which abandoned the original audience without convincingly winning a new one. the company laid off 15 of 56 employees in july 2009.

viggle paid for the entertainment-news brand in 2012, not for the wikis. the wikis were already a liability by then, expensive to host and not generating ad inventory. wikifoundry took them on in 2013 with a plan to migrate everything to a unified domain, and most users discovered that their wikis still existed only when wikifoundry started sending domain-change emails.

~ what got buried ~

millions of fan wiki pages from 2006-2012 are gone. the archive team mirrored what it could before the 2014 wikifoundry shutdown, but the dump is partial because so many wikis used login walls or were never crawled at depth. character pages, episode recaps, fanon timelines, ship-name index pages from the height of livejournal-era fandom, lots of it now lives only in personal screenshots and the occasional wayback machine snapshot. the surviving fandom wikis on fandom.com mostly do not credit their wetpaint origins because the migration tool only worked one wiki at a time and most users gave up partway through.

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