- This page is mainly about Wikimedia's Etherpad installation. For information about the software in general, see the Wikipedia article w:Etherpad.
The Wikimedia Foundation's Etherpad installation (etherpad.wikimedia.org) is a service for real-time collaboration and text editing. It is frequently used in the Wikimedia movement to document meetings and conference discussions.
Note: the etherpad database is not suitable for any long-term storage—don't expect important data to stay there—copy it to a wikipage or elsewhere once you have finished collaborating in it.
For security and performance reasons, all current pads on Wikimedia's Etherpad instance, the web-based "ephemeral" editor for real-time collaborative document editing, will be permanently deleted to reset the database at the end of May 2026.
The Wikimedia Foundation will continue running this Etherpad instance to support events and other short-term collaboration, but will be periodically deleting data going forward. If you have content in Etherpad you want to keep, please create local backups, as data will be permanently deleted and will not be able to be recovered.
The Wikimedia Foundation are taking this step because of the safety and security risks involved in long-term hosting of unmoderated user content, as well as increasing performance problems and maintenance burden as this content has grown.
A list of existing Etherpads that have been publicly linked to from Meta-wiki, from MediaWiki-wiki, or from Phabricator, from 2013 up until mid-February 2026, was generated by User:Pppery and User:Tkarcher and is available at phab:P89822 with the contents of those titles stored at https://etherpad-backup.toolforge.org/p/TITLE-HERE, if you need a way to find an old pad you created.
In the future, all pads will auto-wipe 90 days after their creation. After any community-event where an Etherpad has been used, any contents that the participants want to permanently keep should always be copied to a more permanent location, such as on-wiki.
According to this post to wikitech-l, the old Etherpad was replaced by a new installation of etherpad-lite in 2013. Old pads were archived to etherpad-old.wikimedia.org, which was removed on Monday, 30 December 2013.