Wiki Spot

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

~ the goodbye ~

Davis Wiki is a wiki about Davis, California, a university town of about seventy thousand people, and at its height it was described as the largest community wiki in English, with no qualifier about size of town attached to the claim. It covered the bus routes and which landlords to avoid, written by the people who lived there, and it worked well enough that its builders drew the obvious conclusion: this should exist everywhere, and the barrier is that setting up a wiki is annoying.

So in 2006 Philip Neustrom and Mike Ivanov put up wikispot.org and started handing out free wikis. You picked a shortname, you got shortname.wikispot.org, and within a few minutes a community had somewhere to write things down. There was no charge, there were no advertisements, and the stated prerequisite on the signup page was "some vision and drive". The organization held its first meeting on 24 January 2009 and received 501(c)3 status on 9 December that year, funded by donations from the people using it.

The directory it accumulated is the interesting artifact. Local wikis under the United States ran to more than thirty states, from Alaska to Vermont, and the non-American section covered Australia, Canada, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Mongolia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Alongside the geographic ones sat sections for groups and for shared interests, which held things like a research wiki started at a week-long phylogenetics workshop and a community for a browser-based space game.

The site news log on the front page stops on 26 February 2013, with a note about several hours of downtime. That is the last entry. Two years later the service was gone.

~ the chronicle ~

~ sycamore ~

The engine underneath was Sycamore, written by the Davis Wiki people for their own town and released as open source at projectsycamore.org. MediaWiki never came into it, which is why the sites had their own look and their own slightly unusual URL scheme. Writing your own wiki engine in 2006 was a defensible choice, and by 2015 it was the thing that trapped everybody, because migrating out of a markup nobody else reads is hard.

The shutdown notice addressed this directly and with some embarrassment. Wiki Spot would generate an XML export if you emailed before 1 April. For under a thousand pages, it advised copying and pasting into whatever you moved to. For more than that, it suggested you might need to write a program. A volunteer had built a Sycamore-to-MediaWiki converter, and the notice linked it and called it production ready. That was the official migration path.

~ the recommendation that stings ~

Asked in its own FAQ what the alternatives were, Wiki Spot answered that you could search for "wiki hosting" and find some traditional options, or, if your group was small, just use Google Docs. For anything that needed to face the public it pointed at Google Sites.

A nonprofit founded on the belief that communities should own a shared editable record of themselves ended by suggesting Google Docs. It was honest advice in 2015 and it is the whole decade in one sentence.

~ what LocalWiki took ~

The money and the attention had moved. Neustrom and Ivanov took Knight Foundation funding in the early 2010s to build LocalWiki, a cleaner successor aimed squarely at the geographic case, and by 2015 that was the whole of the organization's work. Everything on Wiki Spot with a place attached to it was imported into LocalWiki before the lights went out. Davis Wiki lives there now.

Everything else got an XML file and a good luck. The hobby wikis, the research groups, the small project spaces, the game communities and the one about philosophical investigations had no successor platform waiting for them, because LocalWiki was built around a map and they did not fit on one. A platform for local knowledge had grown a large non-local half, and the non-local half is what died on 1 April.

~ turkey had forums instead ~

Nothing like this took hold where I was. The Turkish internet of the 2000s put its shared knowledge in forums, and I was on them: donanimhaber and frmtr, hardware threads where I carried my own parts list in my signature so everyone could see what I was running. A forum is a worse encyclopedia than a wiki in every measurable way. It is chronological when you want it organized, and the answer is on page fourteen of a thread whose author stopped logging in years ago.

It is also what actually got built in Turkish, at the scale of a whole country, and a good deal of it is still there. Wiki Spot asked communities to maintain a structured document about themselves, which turns out to be a far larger ask than letting them argue in chronological order. The forums outlived the wiki farms in most places. The surviving piece of Wiki Spot is a static copy of its own goodbye page, still answering at wikispot.org eleven years later.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »