Essay:Report from Goat Mountain
Unless some divine intervention happens, this is the last hours of RationalWiki - and this essay might be the last substantial contribution made to it before it's death. Now, while it's possible this might not be the end - the ghouls may only desire a pound of flesh than an entire corpse - but it's most probable that like a wounded antelope, we'll just be easier to be picked off by another, most likely quite promptly.
But the bald truth is that RW was not that healthy before the ghouls struck us. RW wasn't healthy when the first one struck last year. That's why they struck; they sensed weakness and gave it a try. Not that this weakness was obvious to the average user (or even editor), mind; perhaps that was part of the problem. That like an old tree, RW had been rotting from within for years. Case in point; Trent and the server bills. How long had they been paying them out of pocket, un-reinbursed? Why hadn't anybody chased this up; didn't they notice? Even more ominously, there had been times before that where RW got close to a plug-pulling due to non-payment and getting hold of Trent proved tricky. That would have set my alarm bells ringing; that a key volunteer was sufficiently disengaged from the project and/or was too busy to do said function, and that it was now time to start exploring alternatives (or attempting to re-engage them in the project).
That's not the only sign of a project running on fumes. The bodge-job DDoS patch which never got a permanent fix, the modernisation/updates which haven't been done, the tailing off of engagement. The most recent mod elections, for example there was only seventeen voters. And as eight of us were running, that meant only nine non-candidate voters existed. Or trying to find enough people to actually run for a post so we can have an election which wasn't like the ones seen in China. Of all the issues, the one of 'technical debt' is perhaps the most glaring; I mean, we still don't have a mobile mode. In 2025. Smartphones have been around for awhile now and recent surveys now show that a slim plurality of online experiences are now via said devices. Yet I'm still squinting at the page on the diddy screen and even with a stylus find it's 25% chance I hit the wrong button (amusingly, once went to ban self and another time, ban another mod). Or that little thing called 'social media', of which RWs presence is handled by one person on their lonesome and (as far as I can tell) with zero assistance or even guidance from on high what to post or when. Perhaps I should say 'running on autopilot'; that in RWs case was set in around 2012 which was just before the massive explosion in said medium.
Yet before you think I'm saying all this simply to put the boot in to former and current RWians, I'm not - for these trends I've seen all over in wikis and forums alike (the main exception being Wikipedia itself). That a lot of 'projects' are either effectively already dead or pretty stagnant; that they shall continue to exist until either someone pulls the plug or something breaks. Others, I suspect are in RW's position; under the spiffy facade running on fumes and an ever-deepening technical debt. Taking a quick look at our 'competitors' such as old Conservapedia is telling; that if we have become CP c2015, they have become Citizendium c2015 while those have become ASK.
You might take exception to this - 'RW still gets large amount of traffic monthly (as long as Google isn't penalising us) and is rated as a fairly decent source' and therefore argue that RationalWiki hasn't devolved into Conservapedia c2015. And you'd be right; except the bits where you're not. And some of those bits you're right on lead to negative consequences.
Tragedy of the digital commons[edit]
The bulk of RW's mainspace output is dated and Americentric, while the majority of the minority is Anglocentric. We still don't have a dedicated page on TikTok (though the para in 'social media' has become better than when I looked at it last), nothing on 'fifteen minute cities', 'ULEZ', 'left handed', 'dead internet theory' and important concepts such as Akhand Bharat is a one sentence stub in a glossary. Even the good pages we have are often several years out of date, such as living person biogs which the last 'what are they doing' update was from 2020. The reason why this is so is easy; lack of personnel to write/update these things. That RW continues to enjoy significant traffic is partly (perhaps majority) down to the intellectual property we have inherited from our forebears.
More importantly, we simply have not taken into account the fact we are rated rather well as a source in a world which has (especially in the USA) has become a lot more openly hostile to general 'Enlightenment values' and thus makes RationalWiki a target. Now in the grand scheme of things we are not much more than a fly at a picnic, but remember what most people do with a fly at a picnic if they have a quarter of a chance. And their tactics are working. However, the administration side of RationalWiki has not only failed to take into account of these environmental changes, but has slackened to the point BoNs can with decent justification state that the RMF has 'been barely functional for years'.
Lastly, there is the 'technical debt' that I've outlined above. The maintenance backlog, the repairs backlog, the updates backlog, the improvements backlog. Now, the board etc have been moving a bit faster on this of late, but it's quite easy to improve when you're going from stationary. But I am not laying all the blame at the board, either - the rest of us neither kept up the pressure on the board to 'deal with the backlogs' or offered to really help them with it either.
Thus it is a classic case of 'tragedy of the (digital) commons'. The commons were being as popular as ever but less were giving back to help maintain or improve it. That the 'capital stock' was being worn down, the job backlog increasing. All a while a management which was increasingly incapable or unwilling to do stuff the while developers were looking to turn the commons into a new landfill.
When you look at the situation RationalWiki finds itself in today and the above; you come to realise that the massed ghoul attack was inevitable. Perhaps not them in particular; more the fact the 'Pissed at us' list was large enough and one would notice the weaknesses and strike eventually.
Something's gotta give[edit]
Even if we ignore the political dimension for a moment, the other two aspects are serious enough - and general through the entire wiki/forum infrastructure. An ex-mod at RPG.net forums put it succinctly;
'RPGnet, with absolutely no changes is, to be blunt, a community being given palliative care, eased gently downward until one day a server fails and it doesn't come back up. And I say this as someone who will be here, muttering about the value of long form text content, until someone turns the light off.'
As I outlined at the start, suspect a lot are on this palliative care list. I honestly don't think most folks even think of how narrow a base some of their most-valued information / social sources rest on (known as 'the bus factor'). Some, like Conservapedia have an effective factor of one - the day Schlafly forgets to pay the server bill, can't be arsed to get someone to do to tech updates or simply loses his login the place shall die. RationalWiki isn't in much better a situation, either; at some unidentified point in the past Trent effectively 'got hit by a bus' and the worst aspect of this was that RationalWiki was too disorganised to even notice and even fewer realised the ramifications of this.
And many of these projects suffer from the same issue, when it boils down to it - lack of resources (just like at RPG.net). Relying on the goodwill of professionals to work for free, which most are willing to do on a limited, ad-hoc basis - but not at the level it starts becoming an 'actual job'. Even more generic 'grunt work' can if overloaded on a few individuals become akin to a job and lead to rapid burnout. And let's be honest here; 'unpaid work which I don't really enjoy doing' is going to be the first thing you cut out of your schedule whenever there's any type of pressure on it.
Naturally, these are problems which money can fix. But there's objections on every corner.
(Enough) don't want to subscribe, don't want to donate, don't want (or can't have) ads and don't want RW to have a sugar parent of some form. And don't have any constructive alternatives either. True, it's a failure on the 'admin side' of the wiki to make clearer the issues facing the project but there was a large amount of complacency on the other side too; that the current situation was ticking over okay so the unwelcome suggestions could simply be batted away. Truth was that what they wanted was a kind of absentee, anonymous sugar parent; like Trent paying the server bills out of their own wallet for god knows how long.
The other thing that I feel that RationalWiki (or it's successor) will have to face is the simple fact it's not 2007 anymore. The online space is no longer a relatively unimportant, anarchic terra nullius which anyone can stake out a corner and do whatever on a shoestring and hope. Now they're prime pieces of territory where major players with sinister motives shall flex their muscles and try to use means fair or foul to get what they want; in some respects the differences between the start and the end of the 'Old West'. And like that, RW's musket and stick fence simply doesn't cut it no more against repeating rifles and barbed wire. But what's more, RW itself has changed; from being a anti-Conservapedia snark site and group blog (and a host of older content from dead projects like EvoWiki) to actually being something of actual substance and worth (otherwise, why would the ghouls attack it?). Yet we're still got a management level of the old snark club.
What does this mean? That either org in the future will need to accept the necessity to not just reduce that technical debt but also factor in the requirement to have a paid manager/official to keep track of the paperwork/check emails/prod the board (even if it is only for a hour a week) and the provision of legal insurance. In the current climate and RWs position I am unsure these are optional anymore.
Why bother?[edit]
It's clearly a thought some of you all have had if RW dies. I mean, other orgs surely cover what RW covers, right? We'll all just move on. But I don't think that's really true. If RW dies from lawfare, the light of 'Enlightenment values' - such as a belief in truth, reason, knowledge and enquiry - will be that little bit dimmer online. Enemies will be emboldened to move against others, like say personal blogs covering similar. In America now, every institution - the press, libraries, social media, educational and scientific bodies - are either in the hands of the enemies of enlightenment or coming under sustained attack by them, while most other advanced nations are facing similar assaults. You can't just rely on 'someone else' doing it all for you, because it's that mentality which got RW into this current position. And if it turns out (which I think is most likely) that a successor to RationalWiki will need to be built - well I say it will need to be built well as to make sure all that effort isn't in vain.
- KarmaPolice, 19th April 2024.