Wikimedia Space

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

~ the goodbye ~

For almost the whole nine months this thing existed, Wikipedia itself was unreachable from where I live. The block on it in Turkey ran from April 2017 and was not lifted until 15 January 2020, so the stretch when the Wikimedia Foundation was building a discussion platform for its movement is the same stretch when the movement's actual encyclopedia needed a VPN at my end. That is the distance here, and it is not the usual kind.

Wikimedia Space went up on 25 June 2019, built by the Foundation's Community Relations team, and it came in two halves. One was a WordPress blog for news from across the movement. The other was a Discourse forum, Discuss Space, meant for organizers and affiliates and anyone else who wanted to ask a question in public. Both sat at space.wmflabs.org, an address on the Foundation's cloud sandbox, because Space was labeled a prototype and never graduated to a production domain.

The need was real enough. Conversation in the Wikimedia world happens on talk pages, which are wiki articles pretending to be threads: you reply by indenting with colons, you sign your name by typing four tildes, and the whole apparatus dates from a decade when nothing better existed and stayed because everybody who stayed had learned it. A modern forum next to that looks like an obvious upgrade.

~ the chronicle ~

~ why nobody moved ~

An upgrade is only obvious to the person proposing it. The people Space was built for already had venues, and those venues carry the thing that actually matters, which is who reads them. A question on a village pump gets seen by the editors who watch that page. The same question on a new forum gets seen by whoever chose to install another habit that week.

The Foundation's own account of what happened is short and does not flatter anyone. Many curious and open-minded volunteers joined Space, and only a small percentage stayed engaged. That is the standard shape of a community platform launched next to a working one, and it is the shape Wikimedia's own history keeps producing: the software is never the reason people talk to each other.

~ the freeze ~

The closing notice went up on 18 February 2020 on the Space blog itself, under a title about next steps, which is the polite register these things get written in. The plan was to freeze Discuss Space by 31 March, stopping new posts and comments while leaving what had been written publicly readable. The blog would continue somewhere else.

Somewhere else turned out to be Diff, the Foundation's community blog, which launched later in 2020 and absorbed the Space posts. Nine months is a short life for a platform and a very normal one for a prototype, which is what the address always said it was.

~ where it points now ~

space.wmflabs.org still resolves. Open it today and you land on diff.wikimedia.org, reading news from the Wikimedia movement, with no sign that the address you typed was ever a forum. The blog half survived by moving. The forum half is the redirect.

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