The Why Files

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

~ the obit ~

The farewell post has a recording of a dial-up modem handshake embedded in it, as an mp3, right above the first paragraph. That is the correct sound for this thing. The Why Files opened in 1996, two years before I got a modem of my own, and by the time I was online a US university's science magazine was not what you loaded on a 14.4k line from Turkey. I read it the way most of the world reads an American campus project, which is late and from the outside.

What it was: a science magazine attached to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, covering the science behind whatever was in the news that week. The National Science Foundation funded it first, as a deliberate experiment inside the National Institute for Science Education. NSF wanted to know whether the web could be harnessed to communicate science to mass audiences, and The Why Files was the test case. Terry Devitt edited it from the start.

The verdict arrived in 2001, when the project won the Science Journalism Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Science in Society award from the National Association of Science Writers. Both were handed to online science writing for the first time. After the NSF grant ran out the university picked up the tab and kept paying for seventeen years, which the staff described as a version of the century-old Wisconsin Idea that obliges the state university to push its knowledge out past its own walls.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it wrote ~

The farewell post lists the moves it was proudest of. Melting glaciers on Kilimanjaro got covered as mock-Hemingway, under the headline "No Snows on Kilimanjaro", and the dog that recognized 260 words got written up from the dog's point of view. The twenty-year subject list runs from pedophilia and plant breeding through epidemics, language, cloning and climate change, which is a strange thing to see assembled in one place and is exactly what "the science behind the news" turns out to mean when you do it weekly for two decades.

Devitt's closing diagnosis spends most of its length on the medium before it gets anywhere near the money. Screens replaced magazines and newspapers, and as dial-up faded the web learned to carry photo and video with increasing fidelity. Then shorter became king, with readers hovering over a trackpad waiting to jump somewhere else; he names the 140-character monster without naming it. Then the actual cause: UW-Madison was under new budget constraints, and a project that had been generously supported for seventeen years was no longer something the university could carry.

~ nine years as an archive ~

"We will remain on the web, but only as an archive." That promise was kept for longer than most. The front page froze with "Thank you! We had a blast." sitting above the Bye-Bye post, and the date line under the masthead stopped at Friday, 10 March 2017. Wayback shows the same frozen WordPress front page coming back at twelve to fifteen kilobytes through the whole of 2024 and into the spring of 2025, last served intact on 1 April 2025.

~ what took the domain ~

By 8 May 2025 whyfiles.org was answering with a Korean-language ranking of online casinos, a 37 KB affiliate page carrying its own last-updated stamp of 17 April 2025. So the archive went dark somewhere in the first half of April, not at the end of March as the Archive Team page records it. The domain today sits behind Cloudflare and returns 403 to anything that asks. Everything The Why Files published is still readable in the Wayback Machine, which was the only part of the plan nobody at the university had to fund.

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