A few months ago I relaunched ZineWiki, the “Independent Media Wikipedia”.
Recently, I sat down with Broken Pencil magazine writer, Hassan Fakih, to talk about the relaunch of ZineWiki.
You can read the article in the latest issue (#94) of Broken Pencil, or view it online.
Five years ago, ZineWiki went dark. For many, it would have been easy to miss this. But for loyal followers of the site, where zine fanatics can look up zines and creators or add an entry, it was an eerie silence. Now, it’s back.
“ZineWiki was always a project I was passionate about,” says Alan Lastufka, who created the open-source encyclopedia. “I regretted letting it deteriorate and eventually giving it away, even if that is what was best for its survival at the time.”
ZineWiki started in 2006, when Lastufka was notified that one of the pages he’d authored on Wikipedia was deleted after being deemed “not notable.” It was a page for Alex Wrekk, one of the most well-known and prolific zinesters of their generation.
“[It] pissed me off,” Lastufka recalls. “I realized it’s not just Wikipedia who thinks of small press and indie publications as ‘not notable,’ it’s many people and organizations. So if we wanted to preserve the history, document our present, and inform the future, we would have to — like everything else — do it ourselves.”
The article continues on Broken Pencil‘s website.
