Seeking the stories within student-run websites.
By Stephen Dames
Illustration by Selin Ho
In an anonymous comment on a May 11, 2008, Bwog article titled “Reminder: Pillow Fight!” we find an encapsulation of what websites like WikiCU and CULPA mean to students at Columbia. As the commenter puts it, when a WikiCU article is created,“an institutional memory is formed.”
While perusing these websites is, like some other chronically-online Columbia students, a favorite pastime of mine, I didn’t find this quote by chance. On the contrary, this comment can be found in several more public places. What was just an offhand joke about the creation of a wiki page for the short-lived Columbia Spring Pillow Fight (when, the week before finals, organized teams faced off at midnight on the South Lawn) is now a student-written self-definition for WikiCU found at the top of the “About WikiCU” page. The comment was also included in a 2011 Blue Note in this magazine, which coincidentally was published online by Bwog, the site where the comment was originally written.
Like layers of sediment built up over the generations, the collection of websites, forums, and blogs that make up the student-run Columbia websphere is dense, labyrinthine, and continually decaying. This decay manifests itself most clearly in the look and feel of the sites themselves: broken links are common, the user interfaces often feel clunky if not downright unusable, and active users seem to be increasingly scarce. Each site references the others for assurance and backing, and most follow a similar historical trajectory with brief periods of intense interest mixed with longer stretches of inactivity.
Following the rise and fall of the 2000s blogosphere, both WikiCU and CULPA (the most notable examples of the current student websphere) have followed a near-identical course, with each of these sites, at different times, either fully breaking, needing new admins, or being taken over by other, more established organizations. CULPA, for instance, is now run by Spec’s “Product and Engineering teams,” while WikiCU had to be revived in a 2020 “Wikithon” run by Bwog. Other sites like the Columbia Shallot (CU’s take on The Onion) or Off Broadway (a blog for study abroad students to document their semesters off campus) have ceased to exist altogether.
But within this cycle of death and resurrection, these webpages do something that no school administration or more established student group has managed: They preserve not only the history of student life at Columbia, but the rhetoric and sound of it.
While it’s interesting to read tidbits about M2M—a fondly remembered late-night Japanese grocery store and restaurant formerly located at 115th street—or Professor Gayatri Spivak’s 2004 Introduction to Comp-Lit & Society Class—described by one CULPA reviewer as a “A TOTAL NIGHTMARE AND [AN] UTTER DISASTER”—curiosity is not all these sites have to offer. And while the posts on these websites are often useful—it’s always good to know what dorms have long-standing rat problems or which professor is “both an idiot and pretentious, a deadly combination”—the reason they have stood the test of time is that they are constituted by and in the voice of students.
The humor, tone, and personality of the posts are what stand out most to the long-time reader, with the added bonus that, as they are written by students undergoing similar experiences to most of us, the inside jokes and witty observations in the posts are often intelligible even decades after they were originally written. Some sites, like the now-defunct Bored@Butler (at one point one of the most active online forums at Columbia), have even been known for having notorious users with cult followings. Though B@B—as it was colloquially known—was originally an anonymous message-board, it rebranded in 2011 with “personalities” which allowed users to enter any name and then be known by it on the site. The type of cult users this new feature attracted were often not benign, with misogyny and racism rampant on its webpages in the 2010s. It also became known as a place to find others interested in clandestine sex (especially, as the name indicates, within Butler itself).
While each of these sites had its own personality, the typical sound of the posts on these forums evolved and shifted along with the student population. For instance, a CULPA review from 2005 has a distinctly different feel than one crafted in 2020, and WikiCU articles from certain Columbia “eras” have distinct writing styles. But there are continuities too. The humor, for instance, remains remarkably similar, with WikiCU’s trademark dry, sarcastic, and often self-aware tone transcending any one user—a trademark that one could say is the stamp of the too eager-to-fit-in new New Yorker. In the article on Famiglia’s, for example, one can read that “Famous Famiglia is a pizza restaurant on Broadway at 111th St. It's famous only in the Warholian sense.”
It often feels like these clunky old sites are filled with ghosts in the machine; the voices of students whose silly opinions, dirty jokes, and embarrassingly poor runs for student council have lasted far beyond their own four years. So even when these sites decay, as they have a penchant to do, something close to care or meaning is preserved in their buffering webpages.
In a funny way, this fact isn’t lost on the admins of these sites, despite their frequent statements that their websites are, in fact and for the final time, "back." In an article titled “Blogs” on WikiCU, there remains a not-too-recently edited list titled “Inactive Blogs” that serves as a memorial to Columbia sites of old. These defunct 2000s era blogs include oddities like an anonymously run site titled Hash Browns … and Toast! as well as more serious examples like Professor Jenny Davidson’s Light Reading.
But, what stands out most beyond their dated titles and broken links (and the fact that there’s a record of them at all) is that this page doesn’t focus on outcomes. It doesn’t care about why some sites continue existing and others don’t, or, at a macro level, on who did what after leaving Columbia. Instead, it focuses on something radically different: what we, the students, did, said, and sounded like when we were (as the oft-quoted line from Dazed and Confused goes) “stuck in this place.”