The WikEmacs Experiment is Over!

Less than an year ago amid a lot of turmoil I’ve started an alternative to EmacsWiki. The project took off to a great start, but quickly lost traction and now it’s time to face the truth - I had an assumption, it turned out it (I) was wrong and I should come to terms with that.

It’s more than apparent at this point that the majority of the Emacs community is happy with EmacsWiki and that’s fine by me. I’ll be closing down WikEmacs after 2-3 months and I suggest that everyone who’s contributed significant chunks of content to it migrate them to EmacsWiki (I’ll personally move everything good I find). I don’t want the work people have done to just disappear.

Given the small interest in WikEmacs I doubt that many people will miss it. I thank all the contributors and the supporters of the idea. In the long term it would be better for us to have a single repository of Emacs knowledge, that’s why I decided to terminate WikEmacs sooner rather than later.

I want to extend a big public apology to Alex Schroeder for my harsh criticism of EmacsWiki. One year later I see that stewarding documentation projects and nurturing a healthy community around them is much harder than writing software. I’m but a humble software engineer and you’ll have to forgive me for my misguided actions.

I hope that something good has (will) come up from all this drama. At the very least I urge everyone who cares for EmacsWiki to try and clean up, extend and improve at least a couple of articles on subjects that are of importance to him. I know that’s something I’ll be doing from now on.

See you on EmacsWiki!

WikEmacs is dead! Long live the one true EmacsWiki!