For many years, the Custom Mario Kart Wiki has been the place to find mods and resources for the games. Whether you’re looking for Mario Kart Wii tracks and distributions, Mario Kart 8 custom characters or resources for learning how to make mods in general, the wiki is the place to find it online. The one place every creator shares their work in the scene.
Unfortunately, that’s about to change. Why? Because out of the blue, the wiki’s creator has announced the site is being shut down. Here’s the announcement about it on the main page:
After 15 years of operation, this service will be shutting down. The wiki will be made read only on the 30th of June.
I would like to thank KantoEpic, Krummers, JL, and various former Wiiki Team members for their many years of patrolling and moderating the wiki. Their work has been greatly appreciated.
Pages can be exported using the official export function here: https://wiki.tockdom.com/wiki/Special:Export
The source code of the szslibrary will be released by 30 June, along with a database backup. The backup will not include account data, and names will be removed.
Thank you to everyone who has contributed to and supported the community over the years.
It’s quite the update to come back to, especially with such short notice.
So, what’s actually going on here? Did Nintendo slam the site with a cease and desist? Did AI scrapers force it offline due to increased hosting costs? Did some hacker get access to everyone’s data and hold it for ransom?
Well, no.
The story is a bit more dramatic than that. Here’s a video by Mario Kart Wii modder ScyHigh going into more detail about the whole affair:
To summarise, opinions about how AI should be handled in Mario Kart Wii caused a huge split in the community. The site’s admin and founder (Tock) wanted them allowed, but highlighted on the page. Other users, especially someone named Koura, wanted AI to be banned altogether and for mods where AI was used to be banned from the site.
And various people in the community took different sides on the matter. Some people thought that AI should be disallowed for textures or models, but perhaps not coding. Some thought AI should be banned for writing wiki articles about mods and content. Some folks just wanted it to be more anything goes.
This led to concerns that an AI ban or related actions would split the community, including a hilariously tone deaf ‘First They Came’ pastiche featuring AI bros and Trump supporters, people being banned for questioning the decision, and eventually Tock deciding he was done with the project and moving on.
Hence the end of the Custom Mario Kart Wiki. At least in its current form.
But that brings up a few questions. Namely, what does the future hold here, and what could the community have done in this situation?
For the first question, the answer is pretty simple. There’s going to be a replacement site at some point.
After all, the data has now been archived in a read-only state, and pretty much everyone else on the staff wants to contribute to a new site about the game to replace the Custom Mario Kart one. So, while we don’t know what form this site will take or what it’ll be called, it’ll almost certainly get set-up soon enough. There will be a place to share Mario Kart Wii mods, regardless of this situation.
As for what they could have done here, well the approach to generative AI among modding and fan game development communities has been pretty mixed overall.
For example, it seems to be allowed on ROM Hacking.net, given that talk of AI for translations and an AI model running on the NES are apparently a thing there. There also don’t seem to be many rules against it in the communities for modding modern Mario platformers (like the New Super Mario Bros series) or the wild era Zelda games.
At the same time though, other communities seem to take a zero-tolerance approach to it. Pokecommunity doesn’t allow it for Pokémon fan games, Mario Fan Games Galaxy doesn’t allow it for graphics submissions, and it’s banned for all submissions on SMW Central. It seems to be disallowed for Super Mario Bros X episodes and resources too.
Hence there’s a lot of precedent for banning it entirely, though it seems like opinions vary depending on the community and the age of the games involved. Mario Kart Wii’s community definitely seems to lean more towards the ‘disallow all AI content’ side, but we’re not involved enough there to know for sure.
Regardless, the Custom Mario Kart Wiki is now closing shop, will be made read-only from the 30th of June, and will be replaced by a completely different site sometime in the foreseeable future. So, what are your thoughts on the matter? Are you disappointed to see the end of such a prominent resource after 15 years?
Tell us in the comments below, or on our Discord server today.
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