The Origin of the SCP Foundation: Our Community on 4chan and EditThis (June 2007-September 2008)

The end of EditThis
A quick note on sourcing
The EditThis wiki was thoroughly archived in the Wayback Machine from April to mid-June 2008, but only a small handful of archives were made after this time. Given the lack of further archives and the diminished role of /x/ in the SCP community, there are few contemporary sources available. This section of the essay mainly relies on History of the Universe: Part 1, An Interview With "The Administrator" and a few miscellaneous posts on the Wikidot website; most of these sources come from EditThis members sharing their memories years after the fact, so the available information will unfortunately be vague and incomplete.

Anyone with further information about this time period is encouraged to post to this essay's talk page or to contact its author, Cooldude971.
General events after mid-June 2008
Many people who would play a major role in the future Wikidot website such as Fritzwillie and Kain Pathos Crow started to trickle in during this time.¹ SCPs also continued to be regularly posted: the SCP count increased from 187 SCPs on June 14 to 305 SCPs on September 3. Nearly a dozen of these SCPs had numbers exceeding one-thousand. Someone added a notice to the series list asking contributors to fill-out SCPs two through one-thousand before going higher, but this notice was plainly ignored.
The move to Wikidot
According to FritzWillie, many established members of the EditThis wiki started discussing ways to clean up the wiki and make it look more professional. While he provides no further details, these efforts undoubtedly ended in failure. Admin was gone and a quick look through the EditThis wikifarm's help desk and other community pages shows that the wikifarm was based on obsolete software and run by someone juggling multiple major projects. Even if the EditThis members had reached a consensus on their goals, they would have had no ability to implement their desired changes.

In July, FritzWillie reached out to the EditThis management team and requested that adminship be transferred to someone else on the wiki. During the ensuing conversation, Fritzwillie learned that EditThis planned to switch to a paid model and that the SCP wiki had nearly exceeded its 25mb of allocated space. EditThis ultimately offered to sell the wiki to FritzWillie and informed him that the wiki would be deleted if he did not purchase it. FritzWillie decided against making this purchase and began searching for alternative platforms to host the SCP series.

On July 19, 2008, FritzWillie created a new wiki on Wikidot. On July 25, he alerted the EditThis wiki of its planned deletion and informed the community of the new wiki he had created.² All of this was done under an alternative account known as "The Administrator"; FritzWillie wanted to appear as if he was the creator of the SCP series (or at least someone with authority over it) so that people would follow him. These efforts were successful. Over the next several days, FritzWillie worked with other members of EditThis to copy over the SCPs and develop the new wiki. The Wikidot website, as it existed on July 30, 2008, can be viewed here.
July to September, 2008 and beyond on EditThis
With the announcement of the Wikidot website, most members migrated away from EditThis, but a few holdouts remained on the old wiki. On July 27, 2008, Kain Pathos Crow placed a highly visible notice on the front page of the EditThis wiki to announce the new website and attract the remaining members. The success of this announcement is unknown. The last known event to occur on the original wiki was a vandalism spree on August 1.

On September 3, 2008, the SCP EditThis wiki was finally deleted. It was re-created later that day, but by then the community was gone.³ A few former members posted shocked comments over the next several months, but after this there would be no activity on EditThis besides the occasional vandal and helpful editor providing links to the Wikidot website. Today, the front page of the original website merely states:

THE NEW SCPASTA CAN BE FOUND AT http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/

Footnotes

1. Both FritzWillie and Kain Pathos Crow had joined EditThis by July 1.

2. The oldest archived member list on the Wikidot website shows that eight people joined the website on July 25 and that no one besides The Administrator joined before that day. As such, it can be assumed that FritzWillie announced the SCP wiki on the 25th.

3. Kain Pathos Crow notes that the EditThis wiki was recreated on September 3 while a Wayback Machine archive shows that the original EditThis wiki was still up earlier in the day. Note that re-registering a previously deleted EditThis wiki does not restore any of the deleted content.