Wikilivres

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

~ the goodbye ~

A book does not enter the public domain on a date. It enters the public domain on a date in a country. Wikimedia's servers are in the United States, so Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons have to obey American copyright terms, and a text that is entirely free to publish in Auckland can be illegal to host in Virginia. Every Wikisource editor eventually runs into this and has to delete something they were certain was free.

Wikilivres was built to catch what fell. Yann Forget started it in April 2006 as an independent wiki, unaffiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation, funded by donations and running no advertising, for exactly the works that could not be accepted on the official projects. The instruction on its front page was blunt about the division of labor: publish here if it cannot be accepted on Commons or Wikisource, and if it can be accepted there, put it there instead.

The trick was jurisdiction, so the site moved. It was hosted in Canada first, which gave it life plus fifty years while the United States was working on life plus seventy. Then South Korea, and then New Zealand, which also runs life plus fifty and which is where it died. The domain moved with it and kept moving, from wikilivres.info to wikilivres.ca to wiki.classics.io to biblio.wiki and finally back to wikilivres.org.

It stopped responding on 23 August 2019. There was no announcement, because there was nobody in a position to make one. A contributor raised it on the Wikisource talk page in early September, and the answer that came back over the following two years was that the person running the server had disengaged, the technical problems had accumulated with nobody attending to them, and none of the remaining editors knew who held the credentials.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the fifty year rule ~

Life plus fifty against life plus seventy sounds like an argument for lawyers until you name the authors caught in the twenty-year gap. Anyone who died between 1949 and 1969 is public domain in New Zealand and still under copyright in the United States, and that window holds a very large amount of twentieth-century literature. Translations make it worse, because a translation carries its own separate term running from its own translator's death.

So Wikilivres filled up with the specific and slightly odd inventory that gap produces. Texts in half a dozen languages alongside the English, with Chinese and Esperanto among them, adding up to thousands of books and documents from 1,621 named authors. A lot of it was translation work that Wikisource editors had transcribed carefully and then been required to remove. The site was a holding pen for writing that was free in most of the world and not free where the servers were.

~ the name it briefly had ~

Somewhere in the middle of its life the project renamed itself Bibliowiki and took the biblio.wiki domain, then changed its mind and went back to Wikilivres. The old name won because the old name was what people typed. The front page at the end carried both, with Bibliowiki demoted to a parenthetical.

None of this reached me and I want to be straight about why rather than vague. I read Wikisource the way most people do, by landing on a page from a search result and leaving, and the machinery underneath it that decides which texts are allowed to be there was invisible to me until I went looking at this grave. Wikilivres was the part of that machinery that most readers were never supposed to notice.

~ what the statistics page still says ~

The domain still resolves. wikilivres.org returns the front page, a full MediaWiki render with the donation appeal still on it and the parser cache stamped 10 May 2019. Every article link falls back to that same front page, so you can read the invitation to contribute and you cannot reach a single one of the books.

Special:Statistics is the one page that still queries the database, and it will tell you exactly what was lost. 31,458 content pages, 71,418 pages counting talk and redirects, 3,862 uploaded files, and 258,185 edits since the wiki was set up. There are 38,574 registered accounts on it, eight administrators and three bureaucrats among them. In the box for users who have done anything at all in the last thirty days, a zero.

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