Wikivoices

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

~ the last words ~

Episode 1 was recorded on 4 March 2008 and is titled "FAs and stuff," and the abbreviation is the whole audience test. FA is a featured article, the top quality grade on English Wikipedia, and if that does not land for you then the show was not for you. It was called Not The Wikipedia Weekly because a podcast called Wikipedia Weekly already existed and this was the second one, started by people who wanted a looser version.

The method was a Skypecast. Four to eight editors would dial in, record for an hour, and publish the result on a Wikipedia project page with a table listing who was in it. Episode 2, three days after the first, was an interview with Danny Wool, the Wikimedia Foundation's former grants coordinator. Episode 3 was Sue Gardner, who was running the Foundation at the time. For a show with no budget and no studio, it booked well, mostly because the hosts and the guests were already in the same argument every day.

I have read Wikipedia nearly every day since I was a student and I have never once been part of this. The encyclopedia has a second layer underneath the articles where a few thousand volunteers run votes and hold arbitration cases, and Wikivoices was that layer talking to itself out loud. The recordings were linked from a project page, not from any article, so a reader had to already be inside the machinery to find them.

~ the record ~

~ the rename ~

Episode 35, on 25 October 2008, has a topic list that reads like minutes: inclusionism and deletionism, service awards, and then a proposal that the show move to Meta under a new name. The vote carried. Episode 36 on 10 November 2008 is the first one filed under Wikivoices, and the archive table on the project page still carries a divider row between the old name and the new one.

~ the arbcom episodes ~

The end is unusually legible for a podcast, because the last four recordings are all the same thing. Episodes 52c, 52d and 52e are interviews with candidates standing in the 2009 Arbitration Committee election, Wikipedia's internal court. One candidate per recording, published as they were taped. The last of them went out on 3 December 2009 at 12:34 UTC and the show never came back.

Nothing announced the end. There is no sign-off and no post explaining that the hosts were tired. The project page simply carries a defunct tag at the top now, and the only later activity on it is a 2011 note from an editor asking whether anyone wanted to revive Wikivoices for a session at Wikimania. Nobody did.

~ what the feed remembers ~

The RSS feed is still online at the same address, served off a volunteer's domain, and it still lists all 58 recordings with their original dates. wikivoices.org itself now answers with a bare HTTP 400 and no page. The podcast outlived its own domain by surviving somewhere nobody thinks to look, which is the most Wikipedia ending available.

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