We haven't talked about any particular website since TheSoul Publishing so let's talk about another one. Wikis are pretty much everywhere at this point. A lot of them are very basic and average ranging from the ones like video games, movies, television shows, etc. No matter what you search up for, you'll find wikis that can be beneficial and can help you out most of the time. But unfortunately, you will come across some of the worst wikis out there and it's not much information as it is with hitpieces. That is what exactly this website is and for this we have Miraheze; a free online hosting service that allows people to make custom wikis, but all leads downward when it comes to their community.
Brief History / Origin:
 |
| Miraheze Website on February 20, 2016. |
Miraheze was founded in 2015 by Ferren Tufan and John Lewis and Their headquarters is based in The Netherlands (specifically Utrecht). Their legal name is Miraheze Limited and it is a Non-profit web hosting service. They launched their site in August of 2015 and it's a privately owned company with a maximum number of employee's is 10 (as the information on Crunchbase). Based in their FAQ's page on the website, the name originated when the co-founder worked for the Wikimedia Foundation and the servers were both named Mira and Heze, so they combined them together, but people referred to them as Mira-Heeze. Also on the FAQ's page, they don't have any staff but a group of volunteers working with the site. It is also a company that only relies on Sponsorships and Dontations to help keep the site running.
The Fall:
Can't Take Criticism / Terrible Wikis:
Despite the website looking like an alternative Wikipedia page every time you view it, Miraheze is all community based similar to fandom.com where a group of users can work on pages together. Unfortunately, this is where it all stirs the controversy. Miraheze is filled with garbage wikis that is only targeted to the people who agree with them. Nevertheless, they can't take any criticism. A primary example of this is when users are banned for the simplest thing like editing a wiki page or going so far as to harass them or even dox them. It's so fucking disgusting. The ironic thing is that someone had created a wiki that were talking about the terrible users as well as the terrible wiki's on Miraheze, but it was deleted due to drama when it happens all the time to the other wikis, if that makes any sense. Examples of the wikis are Crappy Games Wiki, Terrible TV Shows Wiki, Rotten Websites Wiki, Qualitipedia and several others which are called Reception Wikis. The ones that I mentioned were all shut down due to Code of Conduct except for Qualitipedia which has since restarted.
Then all of a sudden (when September of 2022 rolled around based on this review on Trustpilot), many of the wikis were experiencing shutdowns due to a database error. Most if not all of the information on the wikis could not be recovered. Despite that the website and the server hosting is based in The Netherlands, visiting the website is painfully slow if you're using a strong connection. It's also kind of hard to imagine that a database error would happen on a site like Miraheze but apparently, it does or any of them. A lot of the database errors can actually be seen on this part of the wiki many of which date back all the way into 2021 to be exact.
The Shutdown Rumor / Revenue:
Before we get into The Shutdown Rumor, we first need to understand on how much they make. Because the site is Non-profit basically earning in donations and making payments, they show publicly on how much they earn and how much they spend. At the start of each year, Miraheze does a thing called a carryover which carries the balance from the previous year up to the current year. They had £3000 (minus expenses last year) from the transfer and spent half of that to a company called ServerChoice which manages the servers bringing the earnings down to roughly £1500. They were able to earn that money back through sponsorships and yet again donations. In fact, they were able to make double the money close to around £5000. Based on this site, the total revenue they've made is $6.4M and I would imagine that number has grown since then.
Now let's talk about The Shutdown Rumor. On June 15, Miraheze posted a tweet announcing that the website will shut down taking effect on August 31 whereas existing wikis will be set in a Read-Only state for the shortest period. The reason behind this is because that they were burnt out on the website as well as the company as a whole. In other words, moving over to other platforms like WikiForge which is a scam and a big red flag. This left the community shocked and outraged with Miraheze showing the failure of their leadership. Miraheze claims that they weren't sustainable yet have enough money to keep it running. It doesn't really make any sense. Alternatively, discussions about the shutdown began to rise and the CFO/SRE for Miraheze named Labster responded within the same day as the announcement saying that he'll try to save the farm adding to it:
"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." - Labster.
The finance stuff is very solvable but trying to offer free, ad-free, volunteer driven hosting to wikis with a lot of options may be a difficult task. Only time will tell but to me this seems rather fishy. Also, the fact that the site runs on volunteers rather than admins is very strange.
Roughly several hours ago (more like a day), Labster posted the statement on the Miraheze Meta wiki as well as one of the volunteers on the Twitter page explaining how he took over to run Miraheze and the miscommunication saying that Miraheze is Not Shutting Down. Some people were confused by this while others praised the statement and were excited to see it continue. This also raises questions as to how Labster being the new leader, how are things going to pan out? Even though the site is sustaining itself, it still doesn't hide the fact that there's still bad people on the site, hence the reason why I made this post.
No comments:
Post a Comment