Wik.is

» see wik.is as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

MindTouch was founded in San Diego in 2005 by Aaron Fulkerson and Steve Bjorg, and its first product was a MediaWiki fork with an unusual position: wiki markup was the problem. Deki Wiki, released in July 2006, stored pages as XHTML instead of wikitext and shipped a WYSIWYG editor to go with it. The pitch was that a company could put a wiki in front of employees who would never learn to type two apostrophes for italics.

Wik.is was that software handed out for free. By January 2007 the domain was live with a page reading "wik.is: free wikis for you" and a note that registrations were private, so sign up to be told when it launches. Within a few months the real thing was running: a red box on the left of the homepage where you typed a name, with the rule printed underneath in small text that it had to begin with a letter. You pressed Create and you had a wiki.

The feature strip across the top was pure 2007. WYSIWYG editing, then tabs for Flickr and Yahoo, because Deki's selling point was a mashup framework that pulled content from other web services into a page. One tab was devoted to LaTeX support under the headline "Math nerds, rejoice!" and an example about calculating the energy it took the Death Star to blow up planets. By April that year MindTouch told an interviewer it was hosting 50,000 wikis, free, with a $60-a-year upgrade for 60 GB of storage.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the signup box ~

Free wiki hosting was a real category for a few years and it worked on a specific bet: that the hard part of running a wiki was the server, not the wiki. Wikispaces and Wik.is sold the same relief, which was that you did not have to install anything to get a shared editable page for a club or a class.

What made Wik.is distinct was that it was enterprise software with the price removed. Everything on it was the same engine MindTouch was selling to companies, which is why the free tier kept getting features that a hobby wiki had no use for, and why the upgrade path was always visible on the page. The footer said it plainly: Wik.is is powered by Deki Wiki, and here is where to download Deki Wiki and run it yourself.

~ upmarket ~

By 2009 the logo at the top of wik.is had stopped saying Wik.is. It read "mindtouch deki express" over the line FREE COLLABORATION JUMPSTART, which is marketing language for a trial. In July 2010 the domain started redirecting outright to the Deki Express product page on mindtouch.com, and the free host had become a funnel into something with a price tag.

MindTouch itself was fine. It dropped support for the open-source edition in April 2013 and raised $12 million in 2016. In April 2021 it was bought by NICE and renamed CXone Expert, which is where the software lives today. The free wiki host was the first thing cut on the way there, which is the usual order.

~ january 5 ~

Somebody screenshotted the wik.is homepage on 3 January 2011. It still had the red Create box and still said "Welcome to Wik.is. We offer free Deki Wiki hosting". The copyright line at the bottom read 2007, four years stale.

Two days later the sites were gone. MindTouch put the farewell at campaigns.mindtouch.com, on a page whose URL misspells decommissioned, and the message is one bold sentence: "As of January 5, 2011, all Wik.is sites have been decommissioned." Underneath it is a form. If you are a wik.is site owner and you are interested in moving your site to MindTouch's paid Cloud offering, please let us know, and there is an email field. The thank-you page it posts to is named Wik.isMigrationInterestTY.html. The last act of a free hosting service was to capture a lead off the people whose data it had just turned off.

The domain went to an unrelated owner later. Today wik.is serves a Hungarian page ranking online casinos.

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