Wikishuffle

» see wikishuffle.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Wikishuffle had one rule. Open Wikipedia's random article link, read out whatever it gives you, and keep talking until there is nothing left in it. The first episode went out on 14 April 2015 from a house in Corby, and by that August the three of them had taken a room in Kettering and started calling it Wikishuffle HQ. Episodes landed on Tuesdays, ran somewhere between half an hour and an hour, and covered anywhere from one article to four.

The division of labor got fixed early and never moved. Phil Sharman read the article aloud, usually in long excerpts, because the joke depended on Wikipedia's own flat register being delivered straight. Chris Wallace interrupted him. Jack Stewart ran the recording and cut the episodes together, which matters later.

It worked quickly. On 12 September 2015, five months after the first episode, Wikishuffle won Best Comedy Podcast at the first UK Podcasters Awards, and Wallace and Sharman collected it at the Midland Hotel in Manchester. Episode 50 went out on 2 February 2016. Episode 100 was a two-hour special released in late January 2017, twenty-one months after the first one, and a weekly show still upright at that point is doing well.

Then Stewart left to travel in Asia. Episode 101 was the last one with the full lineup. Episodes 102 and 103 went out with Ruth Bradley sitting in, and after that the Tuesdays stopped. A compilation called The Best Bits turned up in 2019. Episode 104, "Bring It All Back", was recorded during the UK lockdown and published on 27 May 2020, and its own description is the death certificate: "It has taken us three years but we're back with a final whimper."

~ the dossier ~

~ the button ~

Special:Random is still there, one of the oldest pieces of furniture on Wikipedia, and it has never been clever: the software picks a number and serves whatever article is nearest. Press it right now and you get a Polish rural district, then a genus of beetles. So the premise of this podcast is in perfect health and free to anyone who wants it, while the show that ran on it has been over since 2020.

I was reading English Wikipedia most days across the years this ran, and that is the only thing I share with it. British panel-show comedy delivered by three men in Northamptonshire is a taste you acquire by growing up inside it, and nothing in the charts I could see ever carried the show to Turkey. I learned Wikishuffle had existed by finding out that its domain no longer resolves.

~ the three year gap ~

The distance between episode 103 and episode 104 is three years and four months, and it is the most useful thing about this ending. Podcasts almost never announce anything. The feed goes quiet while the hosts take other work, and years later nobody can tell you whether the show finished or stalled. Wikishuffle stalled, and then came back exactly once to say so.

~ what is still hosted ~

wikishuffle.co.uk does not resolve. The episodes did not go down with it, because the show was on Acast early, and Acast still serves the feed under the slug "notthisagain", which was somebody's joke in 2015 and is now the only working address the show has. All 104 episodes sit there in order with the final whimper on top.

That is the usual modern arrangement for a dead podcast. The website goes while the publishing platform stays, and the archive survives as a tenant in a company's building for as long as that company feels like keeping the files. Acast has kept them up for six years so far.

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