WikiAlpha

The original public domain logo of WikiAlpha

WikiAlpha (wikialpha.org; 2011–2024) was a free online wiki encyclopedia that allowed open contributions from anyone. The site, launched on June 19, 2011, by Richard and Govind, operated using MediaWiki software. It remained active until June 2024, when it went offline due to attacks on the site by gambling spammers.

WikiAlpha was online for a total of 15 years, with a slow, unremarkable first decade followed by its tumultuous final 5 years.

From 2020 to 2024, WikiAlpha was one of the most popular alternatives to Wikipedia. During that time, it often ranked surprisingly high on search engine results and had an international user base mainly from South Asia (especially Bangladesh), Southeast Asia (particularly Vietnam), Africa (often Nigeria), and North America.

Overview

WikiAlpha positioned itself as an alternative to Wikipedia, with a notably more lenient approach to content notability requirements. This allowed for a broad range of articles on virtually any subject, including personal topics such as bands, pets, or individual interests. Unlike Wikipedia, which maintains strict guidelines on what qualifies as notable, WikiAlpha permitted content as long as it did not violate the site's speedy deletion policy. This policy made it possible for many articles to remain on the site indefinitely.

WikiAlpha.org had a public domain license. Articles forked from Wikipedia had to have a Creative Commons license tag attached in order to override the default public domain license.

The only subdomain available was en.wikialpha.org. In theory, all articles were supposed to be in English, although this became difficult to control starting from 2021 due to the mass influx of Bengali, Vietnamese, and to some extent, Arabic and Persian-speaking editors.

WikiAlpha.org also accepted donations exclusively via cryptocurrency transfers. Only a few cryptocurrency options were available: Dogecoin (DOGE) and Ripple (XRP).

In a sense, WikiAlpha had a spirit of online anarchy. There was only source code editing, with no visual editing option enabled. The only default skin available was Vector (legacy, pre-2020).

Motivation

The motivation behind WikiAlpha's creation stemmed from dissatisfaction with Wikipedia's increasingly stringent deletion practices, especially concerning topics deemed non-notable or articles created by new editors. Richard and Govind, the founders, believed that Wikipedia's policies were moving away from its original mission as an encyclopedia "anyone can edit." In response, they established WikiAlpha to offer a platform where a wider variety of content could be published without the threat of deletion for not meeting traditional notability standards. Its complete lack of notability restrictions was quite radical even in comparison to the other wiki alternatives to Wikipedia. WikiAlpha's main page stated:

WikiAlpha is an alternative to Wikipedia, where the main difference is that our deletion policy is far more lenient with regard to notability requirements. Basically, WikiAlpha is a near-indiscriminate collection of information in the form of articles on any topic: you can create an article about the band you just started, your pet dog, yourself, your house - as long as your content does not fall under our speedy deletion policy, it will likely remain on the site forever!

Saving Wikipedia articles

Originally in the 2010s, WikiAlpha claimed that to support its mission, it would actively engage with Wikipedia editors whose articles were at risk of deletion. If possible, WikiAlpha would retrieve these articles and republish them on its platform, informing the original creators of the transfer. This approach allowed content that might not meet Wikipedia's standards to find a home on WikiAlpha, preserving it for public access. However, this was never actually implemented on a wide scale, and WikiAlpha never archived thousands of deleted articles like Deletionpedia.

Unlike EverybodyWiki, WikiAlpha had no bots at all, and deleted Wikipedia articles were thus never imported on a large scale.

History

WikiAlpha was created in 2011 as a response to Wikipedia's unrelenting deletions of articles that were considered to be non-notable. In response, refugees from Wikipedia created WikiAlpha, which had absolutely no notability restrictions.

WikiAlpha remained relatively obscure until 2019. As of 2019, the most active administrators on the site were Mathewignash, who mostly wrote about Transformers, and Geo Swan, who created hundreds of biographies and articles about recent event topics. Through the 2010s, WikiAlpha's users were predominantly North American.

Since 2019, WikiAlpha started to pick up traffic. Users such as WritingSnowman and Dove Windsor joined and became prominent regular editors at WikiAlpha. From then on, Google started to prioritize WikiAlpha in its search rankings, with WikiAlpha often appearing right at the very top of Google's search results pages if there were no Wikipedia results for the query. Since most of WikiAlpha's content was original and not copied and pasted en masse from Wikipedia, it often ranked even higher than EverybodyWiki, which was using bots to import thousands of deleted articles and drafts from Wikipedia.

In 2020, WikiAlpha started to have new articles that were apparently written by North American PR companies. These articles were typically well formatted and neatly written, and the users who posted the articles were generally helpful contributors. At this stage, WikiAlpha was still a small online community without any major issues.

However, when WikiAlpha started to rank well on Google search results, the SEO (search engine optimization) crowd started to notice and joined WikiAlpha. Unlike the early 2010s, during which much of the English-speaking online community was dominated by North Americans, increasing global Internet connectivity meant that the English-speaking online community was instead dominated by South Asians during the 2020s.

From 2021 until 2024, Bangladeshi SEO editors flooded the site with autobiographies and paid articles, which typically had sloppy formatting and broken wiki code. However, they were still allowed by WikiAlpha due to the site's founding belief that there should be no notability restrictions. There were also many SEO editors from Nigeria, Vietnam, Iran, and other countries, although usually at any given time, more than half of the new pages showing up on WikiAlpha were about Bangladeshi people and businesses. The subjects were disproportionately about Generation Z male Bangladeshis, such as "TikTok influencers" or "digital marketing experts". During this time, the two kings of the alternative wiki world (in other words, all wiki sites that were not being hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation) were EverybodyWiki and WikiAlpha. Ads for paid "wiki profiles" on EverybodyWiki and WikiAlpha, mainly from Bangladeshis and Nigerians, along with some Pakistanis and Indians, started showing up all over the Internet, from social media platforms to freelancing platforms. Prices were typically in the $20-$50 USD range (never exceeding $100 USD), and the results were often very sloppy wiki code full of template errors and messy writing with poor grammar. On the other hand, services offered by PR companies in the Global North were priced higher, with meticulously formatted wiki code and coherent writing.

WritingSnowman relentlessly cleaned up after their work, since many of them were creating duplicate pages, not properly capitalizing page titles, and improperly using caps locks. Much of the writing was messy and ungrammatical; after ChatGPT was released, many of the Bangladeshi articles were generated by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Bengali-language and Vietnamese-language articles also showed up, some of which Geo Swan deleted as unsuitable since WikiAlpha was supposed to only be in English. Nevertheless, self-authored vanity pages about so-called SEO experts from Bangladesh were not considered to be spam on WikiAlpha, whereas incoherent, unencyclopedic pages stuffed full of gambling URLs were considered to be spam; this is explained in more detail in the section below.

As of June 18, 2024, WikiAlpha had 18,717 articles.

Why WikiAlpha went offline

In 2024, Polish gambling spammers started spamming the website on a massive scale. Hundreds of new pages about gambling websites (usually mirrored domains) and blog-type essays about gambling started to flood WikiAlpha. xXBlackburnXx, a Wikimedia steward who was constantly battling these gambling spammers on Wikimedia wiki sites, came to WikiAlpha to track down the gambling spammers and report them to Geo Swan. The gambling spammers were livid with rage and threatened all of the active administrators and moderators. Incoherent, angry threats, often in all caps, were posted on their talk pages and sent to their e-mails. In June, the spammers falsely reported WikiAlpha to be a phishing site, performed DDoS attacks on WikiAlpha, and finally succeeded in permanently taking WikiAlpha down as revenge. Adding fire to the fuel was the fact that WikiAlpha's owner, Richard, was almost always absent (AWOL), and never responded to talk page messages and e-mails asking for his help in combatting the spammers.

In December 2024, a Simple English Wikipedia article about WikiAlpha was briefly published, although it was promptly deleted as non-notable. A version of this deleted article is archived on EverybodyWiki.

Copycat wikis after 2024

WikiAlpha.co and WikiAlpha.info were founded as copycats after the original WikiAlpha.org went offline. Neither are actually genuine restorations of the original WikiAlpha.org. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (archive.org) also did not archive most WikiAlpha.org pages that were published in the 2020s.

WikiAlpha.info was founded in July 2024 by a Vietnamese SEO editor who was also active on WikiAlpha.

WikiAlpha.co was founded in April 2025 by Shovon Ahmed, who was one of the Bangladeshi SEO editors active on the original WikiAlpha.org. Together with Parvej Husen Talukder, Shovon Ahmed also runs WikiGenius, a for-profit SEO-oriented wiki site that originated in 2023 as a Miraheze wiki.

Both WikiAlpha.info and WikiAlpha.co are for-profit sites focusing on monetization and SEO, and have very little in common with the original WikiAlpha.org.

Lessons to learn from WikiAlpha

WikiAlpha was a fascinating online experiment in what happens if a wiki site has no notability requirements and virtually no restrictions on its user contributor base. Administrator involvement was minimal, with only one administrator, Geo Swan, blocking users only during cases of extreme harassment and persistent gambling spamming.

Although notability does not have to be restricted, it is clear from WikiAlpha's story that its user contributor base should have been more actively managed, as in EverybodyWiki's case.

References

• https://web.archive.org/web/20240102123233/https://en.wikialpha.org/wiki/WikiAlpha
• https://web.archive.org/web/20240102123129/https://en.wikialpha.org/wiki/Main_Page