Knowledge-sharing has always been a passion of mine and a wiki was a good tool (at the time) for collecting knowledge from a diverse array of librarians across the world. In 2005, Facebook didn’t exist (to the public at least). Twitter didn’t exist. Google Docs didn’t exist. Google Sites didn’t exist. A whole bunch of other collaboration and CMS-type tools didn’t exist. At the time, a wiki was one of the only free ways to collect knowledge from lots of different people, many of whom the person creating the wiki didn’t know. And it received contributions from thousands of librarians and certain pages were THE place to find information on that topic.
But now, other more stable tools exist for this. Mediawiki software is vulnerable to spam and is not the most stable thing out there. I (and my husband when it’s beyond my capabilities) have spent so much time over the past twelve years troubleshooting the software, reverting spam, and blocking spammers. And, all the while, usage of the wiki has declined and many pages have become painfully stale and dated.
With a heavy heart, I’m announcing that, unless someone else wants to run the Library Success Wiki on their own server, the wiki will be going dark on February 2, 2018. This should give people time to move information important to them to other collaboration tools and for a knight in shining armor who wants the hassle of managing the wiki themselves to emerge. It can be hard to let go of services that no longer have the ROI they used to, and I’ve wrestled with the idea of saying goodbye to the wiki for years. It’s time. It’s past time.