Wikidot

Wikidot is a wiki hosting and social networking service operated and owned by Wikidot Inc., founded by Michal Frackowiak on 1 August 2006. The company, Wikidot Inc., is based at Toruń, Poland. It is the third-largest wiki farm with over 1 million active users, hosting over 12 million pages.

History

The wiki farm was founded on 1 August 2006 by Michal Frackowiak.

On May 19, 2022 at around 12:15 UTC, Wikidot servers experienced a total outage due to a Russian cyberattack. On May 24, 2022 at 21:20 UTC, the site came back online and has blocked access from Russia and Belarus in response to the attack.

On 9 June 2024, another outage occured at Wikidot.

Description

Wikidot uses an open source modified Text_Wiki software (engine). Each site gets a subdomain on .wikidot.com (like mywiki.wikidot.com). Site owners can also map custom domains (like mywiki.com – if previously registered by the wiki owner). There is also a list of subdomains registered by Wikidot for users, which provides an alternate wiki URL without requiring the user to buy a domain name beforehand. One can optionally allow Wikidot to display ads on their wiki and take 80% of revenue.

Wikidot has been on life support for years. Active development ceased some time ago, no official communications come from the company's social media channels. The company apparently has only one employee, its CEO, who makes infrequent appearances to fix egregious bugs. More graceful degradation of site services are ignored, for instance a new bug which causes some deleted pages to become irrecoverably corrupted, requiring users to utilize workarounds. The support forum has no official representation, just one unofficial volunteer. Complaints about unresponsive management, even for paid accounts, are frequent and unaddressed. The site is seemingly fixed only for the purpose of maintaining ad revenue from its handful of high-volume sites, with all other considerations ignored.