Bhamwiki talk:Messageboard/18th Anniversary notes

Below is a copy of the remarks I read to the group during our 18th Anniversary celebration on March 17, 2024 at Rojo.

Remarks

Welcome, everyone, to a celebration of the 18th anniversary of Bhamwiki.com. I am grateful to be able to thank you in person for your support of the website, and for being here today, and also to thank Rojo, one of the true jewels in Birmingham’s crown, for allowing us to take up valuable real estate on this Saint Patrick’s Day. Sláinte!

The theme I have chosen for the site’s 18th birthday is “It’s time to grow up,” by which I mean that there is some adulting that needs to be done relative to how the site prepares itself to continue to grow and to serve its readers. I will be calling on your wisdom, support, and your networks to help out with that.

But before we talk about where Bhamwiki can go, there is time for a recap of how Bhamwiki got to where it is. I have spoken before about how I came to launch the site, clearly on the model of Wikipedia, but also reaching back to a fondness for encyclopedias, one perhaps stimulated during the days that Food World let you pick up volumes of Funk & Wagnall’s from an end-cap as you did your grocery shopping.

I involved myself early on in Douglas Adams’ “H2G2” online reference, inspired by his own novel, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, in which, famously the entry for “Earth” was expanded from “harmless” to “mostly harmless” through the efforts of a diligent contributor. I was also an active Wikipedian for a while, until I got frustrated that a real-live actual 100-year-old high school was expected to demonstrate “notability’ (and on a website where every single episode of “Will & Grace” had its own detailed entry).

Thus motivated, I pondered how to proceed with no knowledge or experience in building a website. I began to have concerns that someone else would jump on the obvious need for a local wiki before I could. I met a few useful contacts through the Magic City Flickr Group that I was then administrating. Curtis Palmer at TechBirmingham gave my a discount code for Dreamhost, which promised a “one-click install” of Mediawiki, so I signed up and registered the Bhamwiki.com domain on March 14, 2006.

As it turns out, once the software is “one-click-installed”, it needs a lot more primping and prepping before it can go live, so I begged the help of Mark Ausbeck to get things set up where I could use the site. As a test, he put up a quick list of recent “interstate holes” (damage caused by dropped steel loads on elevated highways downtown.) I turned to the task of drafting some policy documents, anticipating that I was about to be faced with a flood of contributions. One choice I made was to limit new accounts to those I set up myself. Anyone can ask, but you do have to ask me. There has not been a flood of contributions. More like a steady bucket brigade manned by me, and some of you, and some who couldn’t attend today. Early on we benefitted from the eager involvement of Lee Seitz and Darren Griffin who helped greatly in discussing matters of scope, style, and categorization, while also filling voids in our coverage and correcting my many typos. Since then we’ve welcomed a couple of dozen regulars and semi-regulars who have made all kinds of helpful contributions over the years. Special mention goes to David Bains, who has been assiduously documenting churches; Robert Matthews, who has deepened our coverage of UAB and of Gardendale; and to Mark Taylor, who knows all kinds of interesting things and has recently provided photographs for many much-loved but nearly-forgotten downtown murals.

The site’s growth has been steady. Pulling liberally from Wikipedia we put up over 2,000 articles in the first year. Since then we’ve averaged more than 1,000 per year, which is more than 3 per day(!); And more and more, when I’m making contributions, I’m updating or expanding existing articles rather than starting new ones. I feel privileged to be able to focus my time on increasing the range and quality of our content rather than on operating a business enterprise or managing a bunch of anonymous yahoos engaged in online disputes. And, as I’ve noted before, the number of “red links”, or unwritten articles for which at least one mention has been made, is growing faster than our number of actual articles. We’re up to 97,542 redlinks, and with nearly 17,600 entries written, have filled only 15% of the demand already established.

With regard to range and quality, previously I’ve compared Bhamwiki to Stadtwiki Karlsruhe in Germany, which was about the biggest local wiki I could find. In 2016 we had less than half as many entries as that major site, now we’re at just over 2/3rds of their scope. Since then, I’ve taken also note of the Salzburg Wiki, in Austria, which is about three times our size, but that's with 10 times as many user accounts and 10 times as many active editors. Meanwhile in the US, we have surpassed another project, Rocwiki in Rochester, New York, which reports 16,821 pages currently. Another noteworthy peer has been DavisWiki in Davis, California. That project was launched in 2002 and grew very rapidly with open access. It became a non-profit in 2009 and moved to a new platform with a Knight Foundation grant in 2010, but has since become somewhat moribund, from what I can tell.

I can’t say for sure, but if Bhamwiki isn’t the biggest and best quality local wiki outside of the German-speaking world, I haven’t found its rival.

There are some things I can’t tell you. I can’t say much about page views, demand, or referrals from other sites. I don’t have any analytics tools installed. I don’t have a goal for reach or usage. My goal is to be useful; and my hope is that anyone who would benefit from finding the information on the site will be able to. Some of us have made forays into engaging with the public through various social media accounts. I can’t really say that those efforts have repaid the time spent on them, but if you missed seeing Chivon’s series of “Ham Nuggets” on Instagram, you should go dig those up.

I am told from time to time that people find the site invaluable, and that gives me pride. Most recently I blushed to read Burgin Mathews’ effusive praise for the site in the acknowledgements published in his fantastic [[recent book on Birmingham’s jazz tradition.

But beyond this steady growth and success, there have been moments that tested my abilities and resources. We’ve had some issues with hosting resources that I had to work out with Dreamhost. For a while we had an unintended sideline of marketing illicit pharmaceuticals through sites that polled our database indirectly, which Matt Sheets helped me to sort out. My general disinterest in learning the details of how the site software and hardware interoperate reached a head last fall when Dreamhost upgraded their PHP to a version no longer compatible with our out-of-date Mediawiki installation. That impasse led me to Daniel Pearson and our friendly neighborhood website provider Knownhost. We successfully moved and updated the site this past October with the generous help of his team. With the update came some opportunities to further customize and better back-up the site– opportunities I have yet to see to fruition.

At the same time, we also endured a threat of a defamation lawsuit from a public figure unhappy that the site preserved news reports of claims made against him. Though I am confident we did nothing to merit such a threat, the dispute did lead me to reach out to attorneys for advice and services, and to look around for a way to secure some kind of insurance policy that would cover the cost of defending such claims in the future. This search is ongoing.

So it’s that kind of “adulting” that, along with the 18th birthday of Bhamwiki, and the hope that it will continued to grow and thrive, leads to me to ask for some help today. What I’d like to do is put together a more formal panel of advisors, an “advisory board” you might say, or perhaps an "exploratory committee", that can help put the site on its best footing for the future. There will be challenges to face and opportunities to grasp going forward that might be beyond my personal capacity, and there’s reason to believe that over the next 50 years or so, my capacities may even diminish somewhat. I would be pleased, and I’m sure our users would appreciate it, if the success of this project exceeded my own abilities.

I’m hoping some of you can help with that. We’ll start today with a soliciting statements of interest, and we’ll probably set up a discussion forum online and in-person. If there’s an incorporation in the site’s future, this is the ground floor. If you know someone not here that should be involved, let’s go ahead and reach out. If I need to meet somebody, let’s set it up and I’ll spring for the coffee.