Miraheze-2-year

From Miraheze Meta, Miraheze's central coordination wiki
Miraheze celebrates two years!

Two years ago today, the first steps were taken to start up Miraheze. A very small group of people started working together to not only offer people the chance to make their own communities, but to give people the chance to join the Miraheze community.

This celebration is not just about how Miraheze has grown over the last two years, but it is also about the communities that have grown with us. Miraheze is honored to support each of the communities that utilize our service.

We've proven yet again that it is possible to run a nonprofit wiki farm entirely on community support. After two years, our growing expenses are still covered completely by donations from our users, with a growing buffer that will allow Miraheze to continue growing. Our staff is completely volunteer based, and anyone is welcome to contribute to our software. So thank you everyone for your contributions that help make Miraheze so great!

From here, we're looking to expand in the future. In the last year we enabled ManageWiki on all wikis, allowing bureaucrats to change their wiki's sitename and choose whether or not their wiki is public. We plan on continuously improving the features available to our users.

We want to continue to grow our existing communities, and promote Miraheze as a platform. And of course, we will continue to improve site stability and availability while increasing available features.

Over two years, Miraheze has lost some of our staff, and gained new staff members. Although losing volunteers can have a significant impact on our community, we are thankful for all contributors help and believe we are still striving. I would like to take this opportunity to specifically thank John, one of Miraheze's founders, for his immensly valuable contributions to Miraheze. Although he is no longer a staff member, John still continues to support Miraheze. I would also like to take the opportunity to welcome Void, Miraheze's newest (and first non-system administrator) Steward.

Thanks to everyone who chooses to use Miraheze. Happy two year anniversary, Miraheze!

-- NDKilla

Wikis of the World, Unite!
Statistics
  • Wikis hosted: 2278 wikis (more that double the amount we had last year)
  • Unique visitors: 4500 / day (3x annual increase)
  • Servers: 11 VPS
  • Cash reserve: $2,777.17 USD
  • Organizational donations: $2605.50 / year
  • Community donations: $42.03 / month
  • Cash Burn Rate: $98.06 / month
Get Involved
Edit
The easiest way to help out is to find a wiki you're interested in, click the edit button, and start contributing.
Create
Want to start a wiki of your own? Request a private or community wiki here on Miraheze, all features available free of charge!
Code
Have time and some technical skill? Check out our GitHub repositories and Phabricator issue tracker. All help is appreciated. Also check Contributing and Miraheze Vacancies for more ways to help.
Donate
And if you want to see Miraheze continue to provide high-quality service and uptime, consider a donation to Miraheze through our Paypal account.
History of Miraheze
  • 22 July 2015: first servers were bought, testing Miraheze beta and fixing bugs for now
  • 2 August 2015: Miraheze was opened to the public
Meet our volunteers
MediaWiki System Administrator
Hi,

I've been around since the early days of Miraheze, and being the one of the first sysadmin beyond the founder, it's a great pleasure to celebrate the second birthday of Miraheze. While my availability stuff has restricted me from doing some works, I have some plan to improve our communications with community and staff team. Protecting our platform and users from the threats (legal, or non-legal alike) is also important, and we are planning some policy on that areas to improve that.

We need your help: If you can help us with reading code (as said by Labster), please contact us. If you are good with maintaining server, we'd love to hear from you too!

Thanks for using our wiki, have a nice day.
System Administrator (Operations)

Hi everyone,

NDKilla here.

Just really quickly want to say that I've loved to have the opportunity to continue helping out here at Miraheze. I think everyone involved here, whether it's the users, administrative staff, or technical people, does a really great job making things work together. I'm happy that we've all been able to do what we're doing, and that we're making it work well.

Thanks to everyone who uses our site or helps out around here!

Cheers,

NDKilla
MediaWiki System Administrator,Wiki creator
Two years from this date, John and Southparkfan founded Miraheze, to be able to offer a free, community-ran, advertisement free environment for users. Over those years we've acquired new servers, upgraded current ones, and we've also had more volunteers engage in the project. Since last year, we're also hosting two "larger" projects, Wright State University and Wikimedia Indonesia, who have really helped in terms of Finances as well.

I think the survey that we had this year was successful, having 90 participants, and interesting answers/suggestions. We will be working on improving Miraheze based on the suggestions and responses presented in the survey. Thank you everyone who decided to host a wiki with us and also to all the volunteers that help every day. Good luck!

If you have any questions or issues with anything regarding Miraheze, you are always free to contact me at any time.

Chief Financial Officer, Software Developer
Two years ago today, Miraheze was founded to provide a home for wiki communities free from the tyranny of banner ads, proprietary software, and top-down management. And hey, we succeeded!

Financially this has been a pretty exciting year for us. We've received large donations from Wright State University (Ohio) and from Wikimedia Indonesia -- not as grants, but just to help support wikis that we were already hosting. Wikimedia Indonesia has donated a server to help us provide better service in Asia, and Professor Guy Vandegrift has used our service to provide novel pedagogical tools for undergraduate education. Small donations have slowed but we can always use more community support.

In terms of the software side of it -- help! As my software developer job has taken more of my time, extension reviews have been getting left behind. This is entirely my fault, insofar as there's no one else to blame. If you have programming or security skills, and don't mind reading some of the worst PHP code[1], I'd love to hear from you. Because of damage done by vulnerabilities to other wikis and millions of users of other websites, we here at Miraheze take security as seriously as privacy and availability.

Miraheze is built by you and you communities, for you and your communities. You are not the customer or the product, but another member of our community seeking to learn about the world around us or educate others about the world. We are proof that you don't need to be a large company to provide a quality product; we are proof that you don't need to monetize users to maintain a free service. From the freely donated time of our professional staff, or the edited pages of users like you, we have together built a place that thousands of people collaborate and learn every day.

Thank you all, for providing the community that makes this all worthwhile!

AlvaroMolina
Wiki creator
CnocBride
Wiki creator
Cörey
Wiki creator
ImBoPhil
MediaWiki System Administrator
Southparkfan
System Administrator (Operations)
Void
Steward, Wiki creator
Zppix
Wiki creator
Share your own thoughts and stories about Miraheze on our Discussion Page.
We've conducted an annual survey, which ended two days ago. Check this page for the results!
  1. Mediawiki itself is pretty well written, but the extension ecosystem, not so much