The existing version of Willipedia, the College-specific online encyclopedia, will be taken offline due to security vulnerabilities. Its articles will not automatically transfer to the new Willipedia with updated infrastructure. Special Collections and student volunteers are working to preserve the website’s contents.
Most of the content on Willipedia is over a decade old, and the site contains articles on topics such as pranks, forgone traditions, and laundry.
The structure of the original site prevents transferring any of the site’s more than 1,300 articles, so the new site is mostly empty, according to Nathaniel Flores ’27, the vice president of Williams Student Online (WSO), which oversees Willipedia. “[The site is] just so out of date that it’s not possible to do an upgrade to the latest version of Wikimedia anymore,” Flores said.
He added that the transition was imperative. “[The site] poses a pretty big security vulnerability as is, and I would like to not get rid of Willipedia, but we need to really update it,” he said.
Willipedia currently uses the scripting language PHP, which Flores said is vulnerable to hacking. “It’s a language of bad decisions, and you have to constantly be updating it,” Flores said. “Otherwise, you will find a bunch of security vulnerabilities. Someone could theoretically hijack that and use it as a way of getting into all the other stuff.”
Another concern of the WSO board is that the site’s content could be vandalized by malicious actors. “There are these spambots online that just randomly find open Wikimedia servers and spam them with nonsense,” Flores said. “As time progresses, [spammers] find ways of doing that, and then the Wikimedia Foundation finds ways to mitigate those things from happening.”
“It’s kind of like a cat-and-mouse game,” Flores continued. “If you don’t update, you’re losing in the game, and they’re not just going to turn [the spambots] off. They’re just going to keep searching the internet for vulnerable systems. We want to get rid of that.”
Special Collections Records Manager and Digital Resources Archivist Jessika Drmacich has led the efforts to archive the information on the original site. The process began after Flores Drmacich informed her of the change.
Drmacich explained that though Willipedia’s archival process is not yet complete, the information has already been saved. “It’s safe,” she said. “I will review it, and this is the same for any type of container of material, whether it’s a CD, DVD box, paper, you appraise it and see what kind of information is there and decide what to keep and what not. And I would think most of this would be keepable.”
Once the appraisal phase is complete, Willipedia’s pages will become accessible through a standard process. “You would request it, and I would provide digital access, and you would look at it as a researcher would look,” Drmacich said.
Zee Taylor ’27 is leading a charge to transfer old articles to the new site.
Taylor said that she and a few others are manually copying the text over to the new website corresponding to existing Willipedia articles in their spare time. “I’m focusing on making the transition from the old Willipedia to the new Willipedia,” she said. “So far, that has looked like creating a Google Sheet with every page from the old one and a tracker to be able to mark when they’ve been transferred over.”
Taylor explained that she feels the site has a value beyond the information it provides. “[Flores] said that they were taking Willipedia down, and I didn’t want to stand for that,” she said. “There’s real history on there. I think a lot of it’s not real, at least exaggerated, but that’s the fun part.”
