As the former CFO and a former SRE for Miraheze, I'm going to try to save the farm. I was uninvolved in the current problems, and at first was wondering what was going on so as to save my own wikis. The fundamentals at Miraheze are much better than they look; it's just that certain problems between volunteers got far out of hand, and with an all-volunteer force other people decided to leave to escape the drama.
There are several months of runway, all the servers are still up, and many volunteers are still around. All we need is more leadership that is ready to focus on our core mission of offering free, ad-free, volunteer driven hosting to wikis with a lot of options. With a little networking, the finances are a solvable problem.
I'm in talks with the current board to see if a group of current and former volunteers can take over, either by working in the current organization, or starting a new nonprofit and working from there.
I still think Miraheze could have a bright future, and that this was a series of mistakes that got blown far out of proportion to the actual problems that the wiki farm faces.
AMA. I was not involved in the current crisis, so piecing together what happened has been something of a puzzle to me, but I can try to answer most questions.
On "starting a new nonprofit": yes please, it's about time to have an entity with proper accountability.
Miraheze is mostly volunteer-run but it also needs a commercial side (such as selling premium features/support, and paying some people to handle them), so an obvious solution is a coop. I can help found a coop in Finland, where we have several long-standing MediaWiki devs, so that any EU person can easily participate. There might be other suitable EU jurisdictions but Finnish law is quite nice and easy:
https://www.finlex.fi/en/laki/kaannokset/2001/en20011488.pdf
Particularly at this point, I'd like to see better communication between the board and wiki members/crats/admins. No news has been the rule with Miraheze except for planned service outages and donation requests. The way I found out about the closure announcement was from a Tweet that rides in with a 503 error message. I know it's early days, but a message about proposing to continue Miraheze would be useful on that platform, yes?
> ...long term sustainability problems, financial situation...
Weird, because https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Finance says they have more money right now than they had at the start of the year and twice as much as they had the same time last year.
> Owen and Alexander are fully committed to seeing the sustained growth of Miraheze
> Compared to where we were before 2019, Miraheze is in a much better financial position, has drastically improved its legal standing and compliance and has taken strides to improve the technological stack behind the project through the right levels of investment being open for technical volunteers to harness.
So, which is it? Are you shutting down or fully committed to sustained growth? Are you now unsustainable or better financially than ever before?
Nothing about this announcement makes sense to an outside observer who has no idea what "taking into account recent events" means.
My impression from reading their Discord server yesterday is this:
- Volunteers from Miraheze planned to create a paid wiki hosting service to supplement Miraheze called WikiForge
- Several of those volunteers left Miraheze to start a free wiki host called WikiTide
- The remaining volunteers were burnt out already and decided to call it quits
- There are some talks of handing off Miraheze to another group of volunteers
FWIW I had a horrible experience using Miraheze last year:
- September: I created my wiki
- November: Miraheze had an error with a drive and over 25% of their wikis were lost. It took them weeks to admit the extent of this error and that they had no plans to use a professional recovery service
- Early December: I recreated my wiki and rewrote it (250+ articles)
- Late December: Miraheze recovered the back-ups they thought they had lost and said they would merge the new and old versions of recreated wikis. Somehow, due to 'someone unplugging a hard drive', they lost all of the content I'd written since November.
I've since learned my lesson about making local back ups, but come on. It was clear there had been tons of technical and communication problems for a long time.
> To clarify a bit on the reason behind this choice, the technical team behind Miraheze is currently 3 people (5 if you include two unprocessed resignations). Two of those three people (myself include) are currently burned out on the project and wish to step away.
There's also some discussion of possibly handing over the project.
Certainly it is hard to make it gel on the money side.
From their frontpage:
> If 550 of Miraheze's 300,000+ users gave only £12 (16.35 USD) once a year, Miraheze would exceed its budget requirements.
So not for want of £6,600 / year, presumably?
Labour's of love like this can just burn you out. Building the right sustaining community is hard, but it also seems like they're too big to just fizzle out like this? A shame.
Miraheze is/was a wiki farm that provided a free Mediawiki-based wiki to pretty much anyone who was able to articulate a reason and fill out a request to be given one. This was invaluable in an age where the term "wiki" has become so debased that "a bunch of Markdown files in a GitHub repo" is, against all good taste and reason, considered a wiki. Miraheze was supported by donations, which is almost certainly why it's shutting down. There's no reason I can see that it shouldn't have allowed you to set up an annual bill-me cycle, but it didn't. And now it's going away, unfortunately. It would've be a good candidate for a pay-what-you-want model that incorporated usage-based pricing.
Another comment mentions that a lot of the volunteers on this projects have moved on to a similar project called WikiTide, and that's the "recent events" mentioned in the article. https://meta.wikitide.com/wiki/WikiTide does seem like they offer a similar thing (though, of course, Lindy's law applies regarding its reliability/viability).
Thanks for explaining. This announcement joins a long list of shutdown announcements where I find out a thing exists by its shutdown announcement, which neglects to explain why I should care about it.
They are a free wiki host run by a UK non-profit, pretty much the only free wiki host that has no ads whatsoever and also offers a reasonable selection of Mediawiki extensions. There are thousands, but some examples of popular wikis hosted on Miraheze:
- A ton of amateur wikis that migrated from Fandom (formerly Wikia) after a series of poor decisions by Fandom, such as the Polandball Wiki: https://www.polandballwiki.com/
- MOGAI Wiki, a continuation of some of the gender and sexual identities wikis from Fandom. There was a huge debacle where fandom tried to forcibly merge various superficially similar wiki communities, which caused a lot of chaos for LGBT wikis due to disagreement over xenogenders. https://mogai.miraheze.org/wiki/MOGAI_Wiki
I only knew about it because a popular mod Space Exploration for the video game Factorio has its wiki hosted on it. Actually even then I never went up to miraheze.org to look at the rest of the site.
Some time ago there was some huge fallout/fight visible on their Discord which I did not understand (it was all referencing some internal Wiki, mailing lists etc.).
That seem to be the "recent events" on first position in the announcement.
I hate how in search results Fandom is always above the better wiki about the same topic, that are independent or on better wiki farms like Miraheze. Fandom's SEO is brutal. They've slowly crippled the website and fucked over the regular users, but that doesn't affect them does it? Pinned at the top of Google there are always more clueless losers cascading in, they can't lose.
There's an excellent alternative front-end for wikis hosted there called BreezeWiki.[0] There's a mirror available at the very convenient antifandom.com which allows you to easily view a better version of any Fandom wiki page you've landed on.
I wish mediawiki was more loved. It is an amazingly effective and intuitive piece of software. But maintaining, upgrading and managing it and the various extensions is a pain.
I suspect a rethink and rewrite could substantially reduce the cost of running such wili farms but is unlikely to ever happen.
I think fundamentally the current ext management system works well for Wikimedia and really huge farms (I would include Miraheze in that. MediaWiki is open source and there are plenty of non-Wikimedia foundation developers, but there aren't very many from the small wiki farms communities, so stuff aimed at them doesn't really get done.
Was doing some reverse engineering recently and wanted a quick wiki to put stuff on in case others wanted to join in and contribute findings about the same product. Looked around and Miraheze seemed to be the only real option for free wiki hosting (I tried another one first, don't remember what it was called, but it was bad).
Experience was pretty good adding the pages but then I went back 6 months later to try and consult my wiki. It had been deleted per an inactivity policy. Fair enough... they did warn me -- my own fault for not checking the email account I'd signed up with.
Anyway, I'm sad to see them go because it was a great service and I don't know of any replacement.
Confusing - what about the free github and gitlab wikis? And all the free wiki hosts? And tiddlywiki which has been freely hosted tons of places for 20 years or so?
Sad news. I started a wiki on Miraheze years ago, that became a fledgling community. It became inactive after a few years but I really appreciated the no nonsense, ad-free, vanilla MediaWiki hosting. They provided an important service for non-profits like mine.
[+] [-] labster|2 years ago|reply
There are several months of runway, all the servers are still up, and many volunteers are still around. All we need is more leadership that is ready to focus on our core mission of offering free, ad-free, volunteer driven hosting to wikis with a lot of options. With a little networking, the finances are a solvable problem.
I'm in talks with the current board to see if a group of current and former volunteers can take over, either by working in the current organization, or starting a new nonprofit and working from there.
I still think Miraheze could have a bright future, and that this was a series of mistakes that got blown far out of proportion to the actual problems that the wiki farm faces.
AMA. I was not involved in the current crisis, so piecing together what happened has been something of a puzzle to me, but I can try to answer most questions.
[+] [-] Nemo_bis|2 years ago|reply
Miraheze is mostly volunteer-run but it also needs a commercial side (such as selling premium features/support, and paying some people to handle them), so an obvious solution is a coop. I can help found a coop in Finland, where we have several long-standing MediaWiki devs, so that any EU person can easily participate. There might be other suitable EU jurisdictions but Finnish law is quite nice and easy: https://www.finlex.fi/en/laki/kaannokset/2001/en20011488.pdf
[+] [-] eudaemon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LoganDark|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tomte|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BugsJustFindMe|2 years ago|reply
Weird, because https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Finance says they have more money right now than they had at the start of the year and twice as much as they had the same time last year.
> Owen and Alexander are fully committed to seeing the sustained growth of Miraheze
> Compared to where we were before 2019, Miraheze is in a much better financial position, has drastically improved its legal standing and compliance and has taken strides to improve the technological stack behind the project through the right levels of investment being open for technical volunteers to harness.
So, which is it? Are you shutting down or fully committed to sustained growth? Are you now unsustainable or better financially than ever before?
Nothing about this announcement makes sense to an outside observer who has no idea what "taking into account recent events" means.
[+] [-] tallies|2 years ago|reply
- Volunteers from Miraheze planned to create a paid wiki hosting service to supplement Miraheze called WikiForge
- Several of those volunteers left Miraheze to start a free wiki host called WikiTide
- The remaining volunteers were burnt out already and decided to call it quits
- There are some talks of handing off Miraheze to another group of volunteers
FWIW I had a horrible experience using Miraheze last year:
- September: I created my wiki
- November: Miraheze had an error with a drive and over 25% of their wikis were lost. It took them weeks to admit the extent of this error and that they had no plans to use a professional recovery service
- Early December: I recreated my wiki and rewrote it (250+ articles)
- Late December: Miraheze recovered the back-ups they thought they had lost and said they would merge the new and old versions of recreated wikis. Somehow, due to 'someone unplugging a hard drive', they lost all of the content I'd written since November.
I've since learned my lesson about making local back ups, but come on. It was clear there had been tons of technical and communication problems for a long time.
[+] [-] duskwuff|2 years ago|reply
> To clarify a bit on the reason behind this choice, the technical team behind Miraheze is currently 3 people (5 if you include two unprocessed resignations). Two of those three people (myself include) are currently burned out on the project and wish to step away.
There's also some discussion of possibly handing over the project.
[+] [-] Quarrel|2 years ago|reply
From their frontpage:
> If 550 of Miraheze's 300,000+ users gave only £12 (16.35 USD) once a year, Miraheze would exceed its budget requirements.
So not for want of £6,600 / year, presumably?
Labour's of love like this can just burn you out. Building the right sustaining community is hard, but it also seems like they're too big to just fizzle out like this? A shame.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] KomoD|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cxr|2 years ago|reply
Miraheze is/was a wiki farm that provided a free Mediawiki-based wiki to pretty much anyone who was able to articulate a reason and fill out a request to be given one. This was invaluable in an age where the term "wiki" has become so debased that "a bunch of Markdown files in a GitHub repo" is, against all good taste and reason, considered a wiki. Miraheze was supported by donations, which is almost certainly why it's shutting down. There's no reason I can see that it shouldn't have allowed you to set up an annual bill-me cycle, but it didn't. And now it's going away, unfortunately. It would've be a good candidate for a pay-what-you-want model that incorporated usage-based pricing.
[+] [-] sundarurfriend|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kruuuder|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] creatonez|2 years ago|reply
- NATO Cyberlaw Toolkit - https://cyberlaw.ccdcoe.org/wiki/Main_Page (Yes, an intergovernmental military alliance with infinite money is using a free wiki host)
- Loathsome Characters Wiki - https://loathsomecharacters.miraheze.org
- A ton of amateur wikis that migrated from Fandom (formerly Wikia) after a series of poor decisions by Fandom, such as the Polandball Wiki: https://www.polandballwiki.com/
- MOGAI Wiki, a continuation of some of the gender and sexual identities wikis from Fandom. There was a huge debacle where fandom tried to forcibly merge various superficially similar wiki communities, which caused a lot of chaos for LGBT wikis due to disagreement over xenogenders. https://mogai.miraheze.org/wiki/MOGAI_Wiki
[+] [-] Arnavion|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KomoD|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tomte|2 years ago|reply
Some time ago there was some huge fallout/fight visible on their Discord which I did not understand (it was all referencing some internal Wiki, mailing lists etc.).
That seem to be the "recent events" on first position in the announcement.
[+] [-] gtirloni|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antisthenes|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] no_time|2 years ago|reply
Gamepedia being folded into Fandom is still a massive shame though. From gold to septic waste...
[+] [-] bursted|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dublinben|2 years ago|reply
[0] https://docs.breezewiki.com/Links.html#%28part._.Mirrors%29
[+] [-] duskwuff|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nologic01|2 years ago|reply
I suspect a rethink and rewrite could substantially reduce the cost of running such wili farms but is unlikely to ever happen.
[+] [-] Nemo_bis|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bawolff|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foobarbecue|2 years ago|reply
Experience was pretty good adding the pages but then I went back 6 months later to try and consult my wiki. It had been deleted per an inactivity policy. Fair enough... they did warn me -- my own fault for not checking the email account I'd signed up with.
Anyway, I'm sad to see them go because it was a great service and I don't know of any replacement.
[+] [-] bursted|2 years ago|reply
https://archive.org/search?query=miraheze
[+] [-] Blahah|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bawolff|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nemo_bis|2 years ago|reply
https://github.com/WikiTeam/wikiteam/issues/465#issuecomment...
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Miraheze
Already before the announcement we had XML dumps for thousands of Miraheze wikis.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tekla|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilaksh|2 years ago|reply
MediaWiki is also in any cPanel via Softaculous. https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/edu/cpanel/install-m...
[+] [-] sterlind|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jen729w|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nerdbert|2 years ago|reply