18 ms·

Miraheze to shut down

91 points by tech234a 3y ago

cxr 3y ago
This is a bummer. 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.
- ocdtrekkie 3y ago
  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.
- sundarurfriend 3y ago
  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 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).
  - OrigAuthority 3y ago
    The thing with that is that is is the same people that ran Miraheze that have forked, so the thinking behind it will be the same, and it largely has been — they've copied verbatim all of Miraheze's policies and stuff, so I doubt the systemic problemls experienced will be different. You can also check out https://meta.telepedia.net/wiki/Telepedia_Meta_Wiki https://meta.telepedia.net/wiki/Telepedia_Meta_Wiki if your wiki is about entertainment.
BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
> ...long term sustainability problems, financial situation... Weird, because https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Finance 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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- KomoD 3y ago
  Yeah what is up with that...
- duskwuff 3y ago
  There's some further context at https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Community_noticeboard#Statement_from_the_Board https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Community_noticeboard#Stateme... -- specifically: > 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.
  - golph 3y ago
    Also seems to tie together with the last bullets on these minutes: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Board/Policies/20230607-Minutes https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Board/Policies/20230607-Minut...
Tomte 3y ago
That's sad. 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 3y ago
  They mention resignations and burnout but no further details: https://www.avid.wiki/wiki/Forum:IMPORTANT:_AVID_is_moving_to_WikiTide#/media/File:MH-closure-future.png https://www.avid.wiki/wiki/Forum:IMPORTANT:_AVID_is_moving_t...
kruuuder 3y ago
This is the first time I'm hearing about this platform. Should I have been aware of it before?
- KomoD 3y ago
  Doesn't look like anything special, just free mediawiki hosting, powered by donations
  - foobarbecue 3y ago
    That's pretty special, though. A free web service without ads or other BS. Please let me know if you find a good replacement for Miraheze.
  - culi 3y ago
    media wiki's a particularly complicated thing to host and I don't think there's anything else quite like MiraHeze currently. It's been used by everything from video game wikis to casual conlangers to even some state governments so I'd say it's a pretty big deal
    - starkparker 3y ago
      > media wiki's a particularly complicated thing to host Is it, though? Like it's a directory of PHP and a MySql database.
    - Blahah 3y ago
      That's true only because mediawiki is designed for the infrastructure of a previous era, and massively overengineered for these kinds of use cases. Use any of the many free solutions for hosting a free site now. Use tiddlywiki in a single file for 99%+ of wikis. Or any linked markdown system. Making sites for small communities is easier than ever but harder to discover due to noise. That doesn't make mediawiki good.
- Arnavion 3y ago
  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.
tekla 3y ago
Oh goddamnit, I run a Wiki for a non profit off of Miraheze. Any alternatives that might be recommended?
- ilaksh 3y ago
  There might be a Docker image you could use with Digital Ocean. MediaWiki is also in any cPanel via Softaculous. https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/edu/cpanel/install-mediawiki-softaculous/ https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/edu/cpanel/install-m...
antisthenes 3y ago
Have all the fan wikis now consolidated under the horrible ad-ridden Fandom brand wikis now?
- duskwuff 3y ago
  There's a nontrivial number of gaming wikis moving over to wiki.gg.
- dublinben 3y ago
  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. [0] https://docs.breezewiki.com/Links.html#%28part._.Mirrors%29 https://docs.breezewiki.com/Links.html#%28part._.Mirrors%29
- no_time 3y ago
  Not all. There are still some independent holdouts like https://yugipedia.com/ https://yugipedia.com/ and some decent wiki hosts like https://wiki.gg/ https://wiki.gg/ Gamepedia being folded into Fandom is still a massive shame though. From gold to septic waste...
  - iamacyborg 3y ago
    Wiki.gg was setup by the folks that used to run gamepedia, fwiw.
- bursted 3y ago
  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.
  - duskwuff 3y ago
sterlind 3y ago
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.
foobarbecue 3y ago
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.
- bursted 3y ago
  There have been semi-regular backups of all Miraheze wikis for a long time, if you lost your content, I think, with luck, you could find it archived: https://archive.org/search?query=miraheze https://archive.org/search?query=miraheze
  - foobarbecue 3y ago
    Yeah, NotAracham from Miraheze was really helpful and pointed me to this page: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/User:NotAracham/Wiki_Recovery_Guide_(db141_outage) https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/User:NotAracham/Wiki_Recovery... but I went through it and it doesn't seem like my wiki was captured on archive.org unfortunately. The .tar backups on archive.org only go up to 2021.
- Blahah 3y ago
  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?
  - foobarbecue 3y ago
    I was actually specifically thinking of a MediaWiki instance. In this case there wasn't a codebase to version control so I didn't think of github and gitlab as options but maybe that makes sense. I don't know about tiddlywiki -- does that work for collaboration? It says "personal web notebook" so I sort of assumed it wouldn't have the multi user admin setup that mediawiki does.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nologic01 3y ago
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.
- Nemo_bis 3y ago
  Actually, MediaWiki 1.38 and MediaWiki 1.39 (released in November 2022) is already set to help run wiki farms more easily: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.38/New_configuration_system#Configuring_wiki_farms https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.38/New_configurat...
  - bawolff 3y ago
    TBH, I don't really see what the new settings stuff offers over the status quo. It feels like a complex abstraction layer to do what everyone was already doing already.
    - Nemo_bis 3y ago
      I'm not sure either. :D But having some explicit support directly in core hopefully means that we recognise wikifarm support as an essential feature and that over time there will be more collaboration to share good methods to run wikifarms. Multisite Wordpress also took a while to become good, IIRC.
- bawolff 3y ago
  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.
nerdbert 3y ago
"We have plenty of money and we are committed to keeping this going. And so we are shutting it down."
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
labster 3y ago
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.
- LoganDark 3y ago
  Does "a former CFO and SRE for Miraheze" mean you are an SRE that used to be the CFO, or does it mean you used to be both CFO and SRE and now aren't?
  - labster 3y ago
    I formerly did both, and currently hold no position with Miraheze Limited. I updated the post to make this more clear.
- eudaemon 3y ago
  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?
jen729w 3y ago
They need to update their home page. It currently asks for, and will accept, donations to “help us keep going for eight more years and longer”.
Nemo_bis 3y ago
WikiTeam is working on the archival, with the usual XML dumps and image dumps. You can follow updates and see how to help: https://github.com/WikiTeam/wikiteam/issues/465#issuecomment-1596116454 https://github.com/WikiTeam/wikiteam/issues/465#issuecomment... https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Miraheze https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Miraheze Already before the announcement we had XML dumps for thousands of Miraheze wikis.

91 points by tech234a 3y ago

cxr 3y ago

This is a bummer. 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.

ocdtrekkie 3y ago
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.
sundarurfriend 3y ago
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 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).
- OrigAuthority 3y ago
  The thing with that is that is is the same people that ran Miraheze that have forked, so the thinking behind it will be the same, and it largely has been — they've copied verbatim all of Miraheze's policies and stuff, so I doubt the systemic problemls experienced will be different. You can also check out https://meta.telepedia.net/wiki/Telepedia_Meta_Wiki https://meta.telepedia.net/wiki/Telepedia_Meta_Wiki if your wiki is about entertainment.

BugsJustFindMe 3y ago

> ...long term sustainability problems, financial situation... Weird, because https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Finance 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.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
KomoD 3y ago
Yeah what is up with that...
duskwuff 3y ago
There's some further context at https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Community_noticeboard#Statement_from_the_Board https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Community_noticeboard#Stateme... -- specifically: > 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.
- golph 3y ago
  Also seems to tie together with the last bullets on these minutes: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Board/Policies/20230607-Minutes https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Board/Policies/20230607-Minut...

Tomte 3y ago

That's sad. 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 3y ago
They mention resignations and burnout but no further details: https://www.avid.wiki/wiki/Forum:IMPORTANT:_AVID_is_moving_to_WikiTide#/media/File:MH-closure-future.png https://www.avid.wiki/wiki/Forum:IMPORTANT:_AVID_is_moving_t...

kruuuder 3y ago

This is the first time I'm hearing about this platform. Should I have been aware of it before?

KomoD 3y ago
Doesn't look like anything special, just free mediawiki hosting, powered by donations
- foobarbecue 3y ago
  That's pretty special, though. A free web service without ads or other BS. Please let me know if you find a good replacement for Miraheze.
- culi 3y ago
  media wiki's a particularly complicated thing to host and I don't think there's anything else quite like MiraHeze currently. It's been used by everything from video game wikis to casual conlangers to even some state governments so I'd say it's a pretty big deal
  - starkparker 3y ago
    > media wiki's a particularly complicated thing to host Is it, though? Like it's a directory of PHP and a MySql database.
  - Blahah 3y ago
    That's true only because mediawiki is designed for the infrastructure of a previous era, and massively overengineered for these kinds of use cases. Use any of the many free solutions for hosting a free site now. Use tiddlywiki in a single file for 99%+ of wikis. Or any linked markdown system. Making sites for small communities is easier than ever but harder to discover due to noise. That doesn't make mediawiki good.
Arnavion 3y ago
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.

tekla 3y ago

Oh goddamnit, I run a Wiki for a non profit off of Miraheze. Any alternatives that might be recommended?

ilaksh 3y ago
There might be a Docker image you could use with Digital Ocean. MediaWiki is also in any cPanel via Softaculous. https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/edu/cpanel/install-mediawiki-softaculous/ https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/edu/cpanel/install-m...

antisthenes 3y ago

Have all the fan wikis now consolidated under the horrible ad-ridden Fandom brand wikis now?

duskwuff 3y ago
There's a nontrivial number of gaming wikis moving over to wiki.gg.
dublinben 3y ago
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. [0] https://docs.breezewiki.com/Links.html#%28part._.Mirrors%29 https://docs.breezewiki.com/Links.html#%28part._.Mirrors%29
no_time 3y ago
Not all. There are still some independent holdouts like https://yugipedia.com/ https://yugipedia.com/ and some decent wiki hosts like https://wiki.gg/ https://wiki.gg/ Gamepedia being folded into Fandom is still a massive shame though. From gold to septic waste...
- iamacyborg 3y ago
  Wiki.gg was setup by the folks that used to run gamepedia, fwiw.
bursted 3y ago
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.
- duskwuff 3y ago

sterlind 3y ago

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.

foobarbecue 3y ago

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.

bursted 3y ago
There have been semi-regular backups of all Miraheze wikis for a long time, if you lost your content, I think, with luck, you could find it archived: https://archive.org/search?query=miraheze https://archive.org/search?query=miraheze
- foobarbecue 3y ago
  Yeah, NotAracham from Miraheze was really helpful and pointed me to this page: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/User:NotAracham/Wiki_Recovery_Guide_(db141_outage) https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/User:NotAracham/Wiki_Recovery... but I went through it and it doesn't seem like my wiki was captured on archive.org unfortunately. The .tar backups on archive.org only go up to 2021.
Blahah 3y ago
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?
- foobarbecue 3y ago
  I was actually specifically thinking of a MediaWiki instance. In this case there wasn't a codebase to version control so I didn't think of github and gitlab as options but maybe that makes sense. I don't know about tiddlywiki -- does that work for collaboration? It says "personal web notebook" so I sort of assumed it wouldn't have the multi user admin setup that mediawiki does.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

nologic01 3y ago

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.

Nemo_bis 3y ago
Actually, MediaWiki 1.38 and MediaWiki 1.39 (released in November 2022) is already set to help run wiki farms more easily: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.38/New_configuration_system#Configuring_wiki_farms https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.38/New_configurat...
- bawolff 3y ago
  TBH, I don't really see what the new settings stuff offers over the status quo. It feels like a complex abstraction layer to do what everyone was already doing already.
  - Nemo_bis 3y ago
    I'm not sure either. :D But having some explicit support directly in core hopefully means that we recognise wikifarm support as an essential feature and that over time there will be more collaboration to share good methods to run wikifarms. Multisite Wordpress also took a while to become good, IIRC.
bawolff 3y ago
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.

nerdbert 3y ago

"We have plenty of money and we are committed to keeping this going. And so we are shutting it down."

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

labster 3y ago

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.

LoganDark 3y ago
Does "a former CFO and SRE for Miraheze" mean you are an SRE that used to be the CFO, or does it mean you used to be both CFO and SRE and now aren't?
- labster 3y ago
  I formerly did both, and currently hold no position with Miraheze Limited. I updated the post to make this more clear.
eudaemon 3y ago
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?

jen729w 3y ago

They need to update their home page. It currently asks for, and will accept, donations to “help us keep going for eight more years and longer”.

Nemo_bis 3y ago

WikiTeam is working on the archival, with the usual XML dumps and image dumps. You can follow updates and see how to help: https://github.com/WikiTeam/wikiteam/issues/465#issuecomment-1596116454 https://github.com/WikiTeam/wikiteam/issues/465#issuecomment... https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Miraheze https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Miraheze Already before the announcement we had XML dumps for thousands of Miraheze wikis.