"This Is Considered Normal": The Expanded History of the SCP Universe — Chapter 7, The Power of WikiDot

by Jesse Meshach LeJeune

Dedicated to pixelatedHarmony and Cooldude971

With gratitude to bluesoul, DoctorAkimbo, and WhiteGuard

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Chapter 7: The Power of WikiDot

July 2008 — October 2008

One year after SCP-173 was posted, the ideas from one brief document had already outgrown two platforms and was beginning life on a third. But the migration from EditThis to WikiDot would prove more consequential than the previous moves combined — not just a change of address, but a fundamental transformation of what SCP could and would become.

By the time the move became inevitable, EditThis had already shown its breaking points in concrete ways: week-long outages that froze work completely, and crude goatse-style vandalism that staff couldn't reliably prevent or undo. Those failures, as much as any aspiration, pushed the project toward the new platform. The decision would determine not only the community's immediate survival after EditThis's abandonment, but also establish the technological and cultural foundation that would shape every aspect of SCP's development for decades.

WikiDot had been founded in 2006 with venture capital funding from Pieter Hintjens, creator of AMQP and ZeroMQ, and was developed as a comprehensive platform for collaborative projects. The site would later become a finalist for the AWS Global Startup Challenge 2013, demonstrating the professional caliber of infrastructure that now supported SCP's development. This wasn't simply another wiki farm, but a sophisticated platform designed specifically to enable the kind of collaborative content creation that SCP required. FritzWillie did his research, and it paid off: "... I googled other wikifarms to see who offered the best services for free," he wrote, "Wikidot came up number one for both features and free content."

In his formal announcement of the new site, The Administrator wrote "The Forum is up. Page Rating is available. The website is going live today. All permissions are open. Welcome." The excitement in this brief declaration was palpable — each feature mentioned represented capabilities unseen on previous platforms, promising solutions to problems that had plagued the community since its inception. What The Administrator called "proper forums" would prove to be the most immediately transformative feature, unleashing an explosion of community coordination that had been impossible during the scattered talk pages of EditThis or the ephemeral threads of /x/. The rating system he announced with equal enthusiasm would prove similarly consequential, fundamentally altering how creative success was measured within the community.

Most importantly, the forum technology represented a new dimension of institutional memory. Where previous platforms had forced discussions to fragment across individual article talk pages or disappear into anonymous imageboards, WikiDot's centralized forums allowed sustained, organized conversations that could develop over time. The community could now coordinate systematic approaches to quality control, administrative policy, site design, and content migration in ways that would have been unthinkable just months earlier. Recent-changes feeds and thread archives turned activity into memory that could be cited later, so arguments didn't evaporate; they accumulated into procedure. Clean revision history and diffs replaced the old edit scrums, which lowered the cost of enforcement and made it practical to roll back mistakes or apply style policy.

The systematic migration of content from EditThis exemplified this new organizational capacity. User far2 developed a script to "pull... the untransferred scp's from the old site, parse it into the new wiki format... and save them to a file," which he would then upload manually to WikiDot. Through the combined effort of him and a handful of other early members, the transfer of EditThis' SCP articles was complete on July 26th — one day after the WikiDot went public.

The platform's plumbing quietly reshaped how people read and found SCPs. Tags combined with ListPages turned an undifferentiated pile of articles into navigable paths: object classes became clickable lenses across the corpus, and author and hub pages made it easy to move by voice or theme. That rewarded writers who kept metadata clean and formatting consistent, and it nudged the culture toward curated indexes and canons rather than a single linear list. Per-page attachments and stable image embeds raised production values and made many pieces feel like full document packets — photos, logs, and addenda living alongside the main text — which reinforced the dossier aesthetic and set new expectations for what constituted a "finished" work. The site transformed from a sparse wiki into a semi-professional database of fictional anomalies, complete with intuitive navigation and a consistent design language. Better navigability meant newcomers could dive into the universe with guidance, accelerating the SCP fandom's expansion.

Yet the very platform that enabled these sophisticated discussions also presented a fundamental obstacle to maintaining SCP's reality-blurring mystique. WikiDot's professional infrastructure made the site look increasingly like an organized collaborative fiction project rather than leaked institutional documentation. Where /x/'s chaotic environment had accidentally supported the illusion that SCP-173 might be a genuine leaked document, WikiDot's sophisticated presentation made it increasingly obvious that this was a deliberate creative writing platform.

Meanwhile, a comment left on an /x/ thread in August 2008 felt like closure for the SCP project that had left its origins behind. When an anonymous user posted a link to the new WikiDot site, a lone, cold reply spoke for the anonymous collective: "No one cares." The migration had been completed — not just technically, but culturally. /x/, which had been the birthplace and early guardian of SCP's essential principles, had finally become indifferent to its own creation.

Yet even as /x/ dismissed the project's continued existence, the community's leading figures carried with them the wisdom of that anonymous /x/ user who had asked the uncomfortable question: why would a secret organization make a website? Indeed, the tension between growth and authenticity had already been breached when SCP made its first appearance in external media in September 2008 through a clan in the online game Gaia.

Among those early contributors who grasped the platform's possibilities and new challenges most clearly was Raaxis — the author of SCP-017 ("Shadow Person"), one of the few /x/-era entries to survive intact through both migrations. His understanding of the format's essential principles was evident in his forum contributions, where he articulated the philosophy behind clinical restraint with unusual precision: "Part of what makes the foundation so enigmatic is the fact that it's very factual, giving only the bare minimum of data necessary and relevant to the containment of these items." Where others struggled to explain why certain approaches felt wrong, Raaxis would diagnose the problem systematically.

His concerns about growth and authenticity proved equally sophisticated. When the community debated expanding through external platforms, Raaxis offered what would become one of the era's most echoed observations: "The real problem I find is in the dilution of credibility. Spreading knowledge of the SCP is a double-edged sword. Yes, it brings in more members, who are then more likely to contribute and thus grow the site. However, by the same token, we run the risk of watering down the very enigmatic nature of the Foundation itself. The more people know about us, the less credible we become." His fishing metaphor — that mass recruitment was "the equivalent of fishing with dynamite" — captured something essential about the relationship between growth and authenticity that the community would grapple with for years.

This tension between clandestine presence and self-marketing came to a head when the community addressed the idea of marketing itself directly. On October 15, 2008, user Bijhan created a forum thread that would attract 69 posts over approximately one week of active discussion. His opening argument was direct: "The web of intricate fiction we've been weaving here is quite amazing. And I think it's worthy of becoming literature." The proposal outlined several distribution methods — placement of documents in libraries' paranormal sections, historical encyclopedia collections, and government file repositories. What began as a discussion about physical publication quickly evolved into comprehensive strategies for expanding the project's reach while preserving its pseudo-documentary credibility.

The thread drew responses from the community's most established figures. Dr. Gears emerged as the primary organizational voice, coordinating direction and establishing structured project management for various initiatives. far2 contributed essential technical skills, creating PDF file examples that demonstrated how SCP documents could be formatted to resemble genuine leaked files. His work was immediately recognized — Eberstrom responded with enthusiasm: "That is fucking awesome. A tutorial on how you did that would be a godsend for those of us like myself who have no clue how to do this." User Noaqiyeum provided detailed proposals for website development, suggesting complex multi-layered online presences that would serve as front organizations while maintaining plausible deniability for the actual SCP content.

The forum thread generated elaborate schemes; seeding copies in university libraries among legitimate paranormal research, orchestrating ARGs, creating "false leads and misinformation" as viral marketing, and even planting documents in government file returns for unsuspecting librarians to discover. Dr. Gears clarified the underlying philosophy: the goal was to spread content "for a mind-screw, not for profit" — distinguishing authentic viral expansion from commercial promotion. Raaxis, unlike those who merely theorized, actually implemented these strategies. He planted realistic pseudo-documents in Western Michigan University's government documents section. His credibility in such matters was not entirely theatrical — he served as editor-in-chief of his campus's professional literary journal, bringing genuine editorial experience to his understanding of how documents achieved believability.

Yet the thread also revealed the community's continued naivety about the institutional frameworks binding their work. Discussions about "finding a publisher" proceeded without addressing distribution rights complications. Users suggested elaborate publishing strategies without recognizing that WikiDot's default Creative Commons license had already determined how their content could be shared and monetized.

The publisher proposal immediately triggered resistance from established community members who recognized the threat to SCP's essential character. HK-016's response captured the community's protective instincts: "DO NOT WANT. I hereby say 'fuck that' and revoke all permission, implied or explicit, to use my shit anywhere but here or the chans... Keep it obscure, keep it free, keep it fun." His distinction between authentic "general mindfuck" activities and commercial "viral marketing bullshit" reflected the community's sophisticated intuition that certain forms of growth could destroy what made SCP valuable.

Similar tensions emerged around creating an official Foundation logo. The Administrator argued against it: "The idea of a Foundation logo is tempting... however, it kinda defeats the purpose of a clandestine organization hidden from the public eye." Yet the same Encyclopedia forum thread that generated the elaborate security protocols for the community's conduct regarding its increasingly visible identity also produced the official SCP Foundation logo through far2's PDF creation work. The same PDF also introduced what would become SCP's definitive tagline: "Secure. Contain. Protect.". The day after far2 shared the PDF with this logo and tagline, Raaxis was re-using it to justify and defend the concept against drift: "Secure. Contain. Protect. Not destroy. We do not want to obliterate these objects unless we absolutely must. We want to contain them in an environment in which we can further study their capabilities." far2 backpedaled and gave a caveat that the phrase was just something he came up with. But it had already been planted and was blooming in the community. Raaxis was the first to adopt it with enthusiasm.

Dr. Gears repeatedly expressed frustration with WikiDot's visibility: "I wish we could 'hide' the wiki in some way…like behind a blank log-on screen," and later worried that "the wiki would 'spoil' the idea" because he wanted "to shoot for realism as much as possible." The community proposed increasingly elaborate solutions to this visibility problem, from deception campaigns where established members would pose as "scared, confused people who have stumbled onto something huge" to excluding the wiki from Google searches. Even within their own forums, moderators had to warn against "kayfabe" behavior, struggling to maintain boundaries between in-character and out-of-character discussions.

What the participants largely failed to recognize (through no fault of their own) was that WikiDot itself was already the sophisticated platform they were envisioning. WikiDot's CSS customization capabilities were extraordinary — the platform could be styled to look like virtually anything, from classified government databases to corporate intranets to academic research repositories. While they proposed elaborate schemes for PDFs, e-books, and separate viral marketing websites, the platform's underlying infrastructure was precisely what would give SCP its extraordinary power and longevity. The revelation of this power would take time, but would ultimately grow so large, it would undermine the basic premises of the project entirely.

While WikiDot enabled unprecedented coordination and creativity, the platform's architecture also imposed constraints that would fundamentally shape the community's culture and product. These weren't conscious choices made by community leaders, but structural features of the platform that became inescapable aspects of SCP's development.

Most significantly, the platform's default Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license would immediately, accidentally, and indelibly bind the entire project to open-source principles that nobody realized was happening. When an anonymous user raised this concern in an August 23, 2008 forum thread titled "Copyright status?" — perhaps the most prescient question in SCP history — Dr. Gears gave what would prove to be both the most honest and most inadequate response possible: "wow…i have no idea…does anyone else have any clue about this?" This wasn't evasion or negligence; it was the only answer anyone could have given. His bewildered response would remain the definitive community position for the next four years. The silent decision would create tremendous legal complexities years later when the community discovered they could no longer change the license terms. And yet, the same open-source framework would prove crucial to SCP's eventual expansion, its immunity to complete capitalistic capture, and its fertility as a creativity project — in essence, the Creative Commons license secured, contained, and protected SCP's very soul, particularly in its formative stages.

Copyright issues represented exactly the kind of institutional vulnerability that Raaxis seemed uniquely positioned to address. His systematic thinking about credibility, authenticity, and institutional presentation suggested someone who understood that the community's informal arrangements would eventually require formal structures. Years later, Raaxis — now operating under the name CityToast — would become Licensing Captain, a role of immense purview and responsibility, tasked with enforcing the Creative Commons license that the community was, at this moment, accidentally and permanently binding itself to.

WikiDot's numerical rating system proved equally inescapable. In the six days between the creation of the WikiDot and its public opening, it was specifically the new rating function itself that FritzWillie mulled over the implications of deploying. As he observed about the pre-WikiDot era: "There was no voting system back then and you couldn't tell what was popular unless people left positive comments in the discussion tab of each article. Something was 'big' if it was referred to in other articles." The rating system was bound to fundamentally alter how creative success was measured. To both FritzWillie's credit and caution, this shift from organic recognition to quantified metrics would represent a deep, lasting, and problematic transformation in community psychology and creative incentives.

WikiDot's architecture almost mandated that the metric culture be implemented. Very early on, Dr Gears found himself asking in forum discussions "should a rating module be mandatory, or a individual choice?" while user cyrus013 inquired if there was a way to remove "the rating at the bottom of the page" entirely. There wasn't. The rating system quickly expanded beyond article evaluation to become the community's default mechanism for all collective decisions. When a newcomer asked about "formal voting proceedings" for resolving the multiple SCP-001 proposals, Dr. Gears casually replied "they all have rating modules, i guess just vote + or - for a start, and we'll go from there."

The enthusiasm with which the community initially embraced the rating system revealed how far they were from anticipating its eventual problems. On August 6th, 2008, Dr Gears started a forum thread encouraging active participation: "Do you rate? I'm trying to get into the habit of it... We have 35 users, and the highest rated article is SCP-002 with 5 positive votes. We have all these new shiny toys, so we may as well use them!" His excitement was genuine — he saw the rating system as a quality improvement mechanism that could "help guide others on what and how to write."

The thread revealed both the community's intimate scale and the immediate challenges facing the new metric system. User far2 pointed out that most members "would have already read the vast majority of the articles" from EditThis and "wouldn't bother reading them again," making meaningful rating data difficult to generate. With only 35 registered users and the highest-rated article receiving just 5 positive votes, the metrics were already generating false signals — SCP-002 held the highest rating simply because it was the first entry ported over and appeared at the top of the series list. The Administrator attempted to establish constructive norms by declaring that "if you're going to give something a negative rating, you should explain why," hoping to channel the rating system toward collaborative improvement. Yet even well-intentioned enthusiasm for the platform's features could undermine the very values those features were meant to preserve — The Administrator would regularly remind authors to not "forget the rating module" despite his careful separation of accounts to avoid corrupted creative feedback.

Over time, the defaults hardened into soft constitutions: the Creative Commons license made openness difficult to reverse, the rating widget gave both policy a ruler and artistic tastes a steering wheel. Account-based authorship created a class of credentialed contributors whose accumulated histories carried weight in decisions. This widened the legacy anxiety that had appeared as soon as names were affixed to works: now scores stuck too, and reputations were measured and remembered in public. The rating modules would eventually fuel exactly the kind of competitive attention-seeking behavior that would characterize later eras. Over a decade later, Dr Gears would remark in an interview that "... many of the issues the modern fandom has had mostly trace back to ego and the voting module." Once quality had a visible number, people began to write toward that number.

At the other end of the writing process, early authors continued experimenting with their raw materials. When Dr. Gears proposed what he called "the first big fight" between SCP-682 and SCP-076-2, describing it as "one of the first things you could call 'fan fiction,'" Kain Pathos Crow immediately recognized the implications. He suggested creating "a little section of the site dedicated to fanfiction regarding SCP" — fiction with "descriptive text, and y'know, theatricalness" that would provide "the full spectrum of writing." Dr. Gears' response was telling: "Fan fiction is going to come up eventually, and we may as well have the section ready. the only issue i see arising is how to make sure they don't ruin the main body of SCP." His concern about fan fiction "ruining the main body of SCP" demonstrated prescient understanding that different writing styles posed genuine threats to the clinical format. Yet his proposed solution — again using rating modules as quality control — further showed how the platform's metric system was becoming the default answer to community challenges; not only because it was exciting and new, but also because it was convenient, as well as being the closest thing to objective consensus possible.

Thus tales were a prophylactic measure designed to preserve SCP's clinical format by providing a designated space for "theatricalness." Ironically, in creating a legitimate space for narrative fiction, the community normalized these writing modes within the SCP universe. Over time, the boundaries between clinical documentation and narrative fiction would blur as writers increasingly incorporated Tale-like elements into SCP entries themselves until the boundaries between the two were essentially erased. Joke SCPs played a similar role and had a similar fate, soaking up pressure and, slowly, feeding some of that voice back into the mainline style until a thorough hybrid dominated the mainlist.

Looking outward from the community itself, the explosive growth that WikiDot enabled — over 33,000 visits in the site's first five days — immediately confronted the community with vandalism problems. On July 31st, 2008, The Administrator reported that the old EditThis wiki "was vandalized today" and warned that "anonymous vandalization looks to be inevitable here." His proposed solution was decisive: "At the first instance of vandalization, I propose that we ban all anonymous edits." Kain Pathos Crow acknowledged the trade-off explicitly: "On one hand, we'd be stopping 99% of all vandalism. On the other, we could be possibly alienating part of our users."

His next observation was telling: "Then again, anon submissions are quite often the weakest articles." The psychological power of named accounts had created a hierarchy where anonymous contributions were increasingly seen as inferior by default — a dramatic reversal from the /x/ days. Dr. Gears supported the restriction with characteristic bluntness: "I hate to restrict access to anyone, but if we just leave everything open, eventually the channers will catch on, and we will be buried in 'desu' and lolcats." His warning was both practical and prophetic — the very culture that had given birth to SCP-173 was now seen as an existential threat to the community's survival.

The decision to require registration for editing privileges represented the community's first systematic gatekeeping mechanism, prioritizing quality control over the radical accessibility that had characterized SCP's origins. They were protecting the revolutionary format by necessarily abandoning the revolutionary process that had created it. Where /x/ had enforced creative equality through universal anonymity, WikiDot was creating stratified participation where registered users held privileges that anonymous visitors could not access. The project began to identify as a creative writing community rather than just a bunch of horror fans on the internet. This cultural maturation influenced content — authors felt permission to explore deeper themes, darker horror, and more experimental formats, confident that the community would take it seriously. Durable usernames accumulated history; history implied trust; and trust justified permissions. Author and hub pages made those reputations visible.

As tools matured, staff also articulated a clearer pattern of governance: administrators functioned like a final court of appeal for policy and disputes, moderators were understood as administrators in training, and promotions followed trust earned through steady writing, feedback, and conduct — these promotions determined by upvote modalities also. Decisions leaned on precedent and consensus rather than impulse, which made the site's rules feel predictable to newcomers and veterans alike.

WikiDot had opened the floodgates for both the technological and cultural development of the format. What had been customs became settings. A license checkbox and a voting widget hardened taste into policy and openness into law. Wikidot made the institution believable even as it made the documents less so — solving continuity while complicating authenticity. They preserved the format by abandoning the process that birthed it. In trading anonymity for durable identity, chaos for governance, and ephemera for institutional memory, the community chose continuity over mystique but they had little choice if they were going to continue on. Those 2008 choices — license, ratings, accounts, tags — made later alternatives available in theory but costly in practice, and they explain much of what followed: frictionless derivatives and translations, prominence contests and deletion thresholds, pseudo-canons organized by hubs and indexes, and staff authority and author celebrity.

The same architecture that allowed contributors to build reputations through sustained quality work also meant the creation of an infrastructure for those reputations to be systematically dismantled. Raaxis — who had warned most eloquently about the dangers of growth, who had articulated the principles of clinical restraint with unusual clarity, who had planted documents in university libraries to preserve the Foundation's enigmatic credibility — would discover this capacity firsthand.

His supervisor, ProcyonLotor, praised him effusively during his 2021 promotion to Operational Staff: "CityToast is an invaluable staffer for Licensing Team. His knowledge of the Creative Commons license, and his history of working with it, surpasses that of both Modern_Erasmus and myself... It is not an exaggeration to say that the fantastically successful Licensebox initiative was thought up and brought through to practice almost entirely by Toast, mostly (perhaps entirely) alone." Yet even in this moment of recognition, warning signs appeared. ProcyonLotor noted that "in his early days as junior staff, he displayed a certain tendency to put his foot in his mouth, which ruffled a few feathers among other members of staff." Multiple staff members attached caveats to their support for his promotion. He was cited in a non-disciplinary forum shortly after.

CityToast's first major controversy emerged from his attempt to protect the very licensing framework he had spent years defending. A tale called "CCK Class 'Copyright Infringement Scenario'" had been posted to the wiki — a piece that included copyrighted characters and self-aware humor acknowledging its own infringement as irony. CityToast attempted to use fiat power to remove it immediately, perceiving a genuine threat to the wiki from potential copyright claims.

The community's response was hostile. Staff members accused him of violating transparency, of acting without consulting the author, of creating bad optics. The administration declined to grant fiat authority. CityToast's frustration was visible in forum records: "I cannot genuinely believe this is a matter of debate." Other staff told him to take a break. The irony was bitter — the person who had spent years ensuring licensing compliance was being criticized for being too aggressive about licensing compliance.

The final crisis began with artificial intelligence. CityToast had conducted an independent survey about the emerging technology of AI-generated content in the community — a topic becoming increasingly contentious across creative communities worldwide, and that the SCP community was quickly solidifying a staunch intolerance of as well. On February 14, 2023, he engaged with users in the meta-discussion channel of the SCP Declassified Discord server regarding his findings, which (reportedly) were oddly neutral-to-positive regarding the integration of AI material into the community. The proposal, discussion, and publication of these apparent inquiries into AI use angered community members, who saw it as an attack on their collective identity and shared values. Either CityToast had fabricated the survey results in order to artificially boost the possibility of AI integration into the community, or the community members felt free to say something in the anonymity of the survey that they wouldn't feel comfortable saying outside that anonymity.

When users requested evidence of his survey results, CityToast's responses deteriorated rapidly. He made repeated references to his OnlyFans account — "Wow, cyberstalker alert. Want my onlyfans too?" — in a server that included minors. He refused to share survey data. He suspended a junior staff member, Ralliston, who had criticized his conduct, then informed multiple other staff members of this action before reversing it. Two days later, he was still attempting to pursue disciplinary action against Ralliston.

The official Captaincy Review documented his behavior in clinical detail: "The admin team agrees that CityToast engaged in an abuse of his Captaincy powers during this incident. The immediate summary removal of Ralliston from a staff position — an action which CityToast informed multiple other staff members of — over legitimate concerns about Captain actions is an abuse of power and attempt to silence dissent."

On February 16, 2023, CityToast was removed as Licensing Captain and placed under a six-month site ban with a permanent staff blacklist. Three days later, the Anti-Harassment Team issued their own six-month ban. On April 25, 2023, this was escalated to permanent — extending to both the site and the SCP staff Discord.

CityToast's trajectory would mirror FritzWillie's. Both had arrived during the project's formative period and contributed work that would endure for decades. Both had articulated principles that the community would claim to value. Both had taken on institutional responsibilities that served the collective. And both would eventually find themselves rejected by the community they had helped build — FritzWillie for creative drift that no longer matched the modern community's artistic expectations; CityToast for positions on modern technologies that conflicted with the community's emerging consensus. (It is safe to say that no one has questioned the implementation of AI use in the community since.)

The parallels extended even to their attempts at return. FritzWillie had tried to reconnect through creative writing, only to discover that his vision of The Administrator no longer aligned with the character the community had developed in his absence. CityToast would attempt to maintain connection through game development, launching a VR survival-horror game called "SCP: Infohazard" that drew on his deep knowledge of the universe he had helped shape. Where FritzWillie had been merely forgotten and then politely rejected, CityToast was actively pursued — his attempts to build something new in the SCP universe met with coordinated opposition that followed him across platforms. When the Kickstarter launched in 2024, community members — including site administrators — actively intervened. One SCP member posted publicly: "While I'm always happy to see SCP game projects, I'm apprehensive about supporting this one considering that, afaik, the CEO of GIB Games (Toast/CityToast) has been permanently banned from the wiki by the Anti-Harassment Team." The campaign raised $4,246 from 84 backers — barely a sixth of its $25,000 goal. CityToast later claimed he received significant harassment over the slow development, leading him to abandon the project entirely.

The pattern suggested something about how creative communities' longevity can mean the metabolism of their own history. Both FritzWillie and CityToast had embodied principles the community claimed as foundational — clinical restraint, institutional authenticity, concern for quality over quantity. Both had warned against tendencies that would later prove corrosive, and yet both would in their own ways act against their own advice. Both discovered that institutional memory, however plentifully preserved in forum archives and policy documents, did not extend its mercy to the people who had shaped those institutions in the first place.

The anonymous /x/ user who had dismissed the WikiDot migration with cold finality — "No one cares" — had been wrong about the project's future but perhaps right about something else. The community that emerged from these platform migrations and technological adoptions would prove capable of extraordinary creative achievement and institutional longevity. It would also prove capable of consuming its own, transforming contributors who had once embodied its highest principles into cautionary tales whispered in forum threads, their names invoked not as veterans to be honored but as warnings about what happened to those who fell from a growing sense of community solidarity and favor.

The community that WikiDot's technology made possible would prove capable of remarkable creative coordination; it would also prove capable of the particular cruelties that only communities can inflict — the slow suffocation of dissent, the elevation of loyalty over merit, the transformation of disagreement into exile. The exciting power of WikiDot birthed both genuine belonging and something specific about group dynamics that becomes possible only when people have something to belong to, something to lose.