Wikispaces

» see wikispaces.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

wikispaces was the kind of thing middle-school teachers in the us and uk used. james byers and adam frey launched it in san francisco in march 2005 as a hosted wiki you could spin up in about a minute, with wysiwyg editing rather than wikipedia's markup syntax. the founders' bet was that the wiki idea would generalize beyond wikipedia if the editor stopped looking like a programmer tool. they were right inside one specific market: education.

by the late 2000s wikispaces classroom and wikispaces for educators were the dominant accounts on the platform. teachers got a free hosted wiki for student collaboration on projects, with per-student logins, comment moderation, parent permission flows, the whole k-12 compliance stack. there was a separate paid private label business for enterprise customers and university departments. the consumer wiki side existed but was always smaller than the education side.

tes global, the uk teacher-resources publisher behind the tes brand, acquired wikispaces from tangient llc on march 9 2014. in february 2018 tes posted an announcement saying the platform would shut down because bringing the infrastructure up to modern security and accessibility standards was no longer financially viable. free and classroom wikis closed on july 31 2018, with the paid tiers following over the next six months and the private-label business going dark on january 31 2019.

this one sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. by 2005 i was already past my own k-12 years and into university computer engineering coursework where the collaborative tool was a shared svn repo or a department-hosted mediawiki. the wikispaces classroom story was a us and uk teacher story above all, and it was happening in english-speaking school systems that did not map cleanly onto turkish lise classrooms. the archive team's wikispaces dump still has roughly two million wiki pages in it, which gives some sense of how much teacher labor went into something that turned out to be temporary.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it worked ~

the editor was the product. wikispaces had a wysiwyg toolbar in 2005 when wikipedia still required you to type two square brackets around a link, and that one decision was the entire reason teachers picked it over self-hosted mediawiki. you typed, you clicked save, the page was live. the navigation sidebar updated automatically. there was no markup to teach the students before they could contribute.

the k-12 features came in waves. per-student usernames without email addresses, projects with assignment workflows, page-level permissions, an embedded discussion thread per page. by 2012 it was reasonable to run an entire course's collaborative output on a single wikispaces classroom wiki without ever touching a learning management system.

~ why it died ~

the technical reason was real. wikispaces ran on a php-and-mysql stack from 2005 with proprietary editor code that had grown organically for over a decade. by 2018 it needed an https-everywhere rebuild, a modern editor, gdpr-compliant data handling for european schools, ada accessibility for us schools. the rewrite cost was high and the revenue from k-12 customers was low because most of them were on the free tier.

the business reason was also real. tes global had bought the platform as part of a broader teacher-resources play, but the wikispaces audience overlapped less with tes paying customers than expected. shutting it down freed capital for the bigger tes resources and tes courses lines that did pay back. the closure was announced with a five-month runway for free users to export their wikis to xml or html.

~ the long tail ~

the archive team mirrored as much of wikispaces as they could in the spring and summer of 2018 before the july shutdown. their dump covers a significant fraction of public wikis, though private and classroom wikis with login walls were unreachable. a generation of student projects on photosynthesis and the french revolution and a thousand other middle-school topics disappeared with the deadline. teachers who had built their core curriculum pages on the platform mostly migrated to google sites or padlet, neither of which was really equivalent. the wiki idea retreated back into wikipedia and corporate confluence installs and stopped trying to be a classroom tool.

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