Wikitruth

» see wikitruth.info as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Wikitruth was for people who edited Wikipedia enough to have made enemies there. I have read Wikipedia constantly since the early 2000s and have never once opened the edit tab, so the war this site was fighting happened inside a building I only ever looked at from the street.

It went up in March 2006 at wikitruth.info, running MediaWiki software and signed by nobody. Its core was an archive. When Wikipedia deleted an article, Wikitruth republished it. When the Wikimedia Foundation used its Office Actions policy to blank or protect a page, Wikitruth posted the blanked revisions. That second category is the one that mattered, because deleted revisions on Wikipedia are visible only to administrators, so whoever was feeding the site had the rights to see them.

Andrew Orlowski wrote it up in The Guardian on 13 April 2006 and Slashdot carried the link, which is how most people learned it existed. Jimmy Wales called the site a hoax and said its creators were almost certainly people Wikipedia had banned. Wikitruth's reply was that current administrators had contributed and that several of its pages could not have been written by anyone without the access. Wikipedia then spent a week arguing over whether Wikitruth was notable enough to deserve an article of its own, and closed that debate on 20 April 2006 with no consensus.

The site did not let anyone edit it. Anonymous editing was off and registration was closed, so a wiki built to protest the gatekeeping of a wiki was run by roughly a dozen people talking to each other over email. They found the requests to be let in funny enough to thank people for them on the way out.

~ the case file ~

~ the archive ~

What Wikitruth held was the material Wikipedia had decided it could not carry. Articles killed for thin notability, and biographies pulled because keeping them was a legal or an ethical risk. It filed them under an Uncensored: prefix and treated the prefix as the whole argument: here is the thing, judge it yourself.

The other half of the site was hostile commentary on how Wikipedia was governed, with Wales as the recurring character. Some of it was research and some of it was mockery, and it never pretended to be neutral about which was which.

~ how it declared victory ~

On 20 January 2009 somebody edited the Wikipedia biographies of Senators Edward Kennedy and Robert Byrd to say that they had died. Both edits were reverted within minutes and both reached the press anyway. Wales responded by pushing Flagged Revisions, a system that would hold edits back until a trusted user approved them, straight through a community discussion that had not finished. He was then reversed.

Wikitruth read that sequence and concluded its job was over. At 21:00 on 5 February 2009 it posted a page titled Goodbye, and the argument in it is that the reversal was the proof: the founder's word was no longer final on anything, so there was nothing left to point out. Folks, we did it. We won. Nobody seriously looks at Wikipedia like it's the place to go for excellent information.

The page thanked the anonymous people who had spent years forwarding it logs and evidence, along with the angry mail. It signed off as a production of Wikitruthia, a Division of David Gerard, Inc., which is a joke at the expense of a real and well-known Wikipedia administrator.

~ what happened to the domain ~

Goodbye was not a shutdown notice. The stated plan was to leave the site standing, tidy some entries and stop chasing new material, and the archive did stay readable into 2010. After that the ordinary thing happened to it, the thing that happens to any wiki nobody is maintaining.

wikitruth.info resolves today and answers 200. What it serves is a Namecheap page reading Domain registration has expired, with an offer to sell you the name at auction. The archive of everything Wikipedia deleted was itself deleted, by nobody in particular, for non-payment.

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