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This page is dedicated to trivia and general information about the Balisong Wiki itself, presented in no particular order.

Reason For Existance

Creating a proper, community-driven Wiki for balisongs has been on my mind for quite some time. There have been multiple attempts in the past to create a "wiki" (although none of them were true wikis, despite almost all of them using that term), but all of those had significant flaws. Some of them were poorly maintained, others outdated, and most, if not all of them, did not allow open contributrions from the entire community.

This, combined with the fact that so much valuable information about balisongs is scattered across forums, videos, social media, or lost entirely, has always felt frustrating. For example, if you want to anodize your titanium balisong in Europe, you'll likely struggle to find proper etching fluid. You either have to try random products blindly or search multiple forums and hope to get an answer, despite the fact that someone out there already knows what etching fluid works best and could easily document it if given the opportunity. Another reason is that manifactureres often publish wrong measurements or dont publish measurements at all. This makes it difficult to source replacement hardware, or create custom parts.

So on the 2025-06-11, after discussing this exact issue with a fellow community member, I finally found the motivation to build what I had been thinking about for pretty much the entire time since i've become a member of this community. I originally planned on starting this project after my University semester ended on 2025-07-01, but the drive to get it going wouldn't let me wait. After a few days of research, i began repurposing my Raspberry Pi, which had been running as a Pi Hole (network-wide ad-blocker) and gradually turned it into a web-server.

On 2025-06-20, the Balisong Wiki went live, but was not yet announced to the community. I've had a working version before that date, but it was plagued by bugs and weird issues, so i scrapped it and started fresh. So you could say this is the Balisong Wiki V2 :P. Over the next several days, I've worked tirelessly on the wiki, writing articles, making the website easier to navigate and fixing technical problems, as evidenced by my contribution history.

On 2025-06-25, I registered the first domain name for one year. I initially wanted "balisongwiki.com, but at 18euro/year, it felt too expensive for a project I wasn't sure would gain traction. A community member suggested "balisong.info", which was much cheaper at only 3euro/year (but only for the first year), so I went with that.

On 2025-06-29 I started routing traffic through Cloudflare after noticing extremely high and suspicous traffic. At the time, the main page alone took 20-30 seconds to load. I still don't know if it was a DDoS attack or just web crawlers. Either way, after switching to Cloudflare, the traffic normalized.

On 2025-07-01, two community members discovered the website on their own, as it had been indexed by Google and they began contributing content.

On 2025-07-05 I began writing this article to document what I have been working on, to give curious community members a behind-the-scenes look, and to mark the end of the wiki's preparations phase, meaning the Balisong Wiki is nearly ready for a public announcement soon.

2025-07-09: The Balisong Wiki was announced in several Discord servers and on my Instagram account. As of now, two people have already started contributing. Less than I hoped for, more than I expected. Total success.

Hardware

The Balisong Wiki currently runs on a passively cooled Raspberry Pi 3B+. That's why the site can be a bit slow and only handles a limited number of requests at once.

Software

I will not talk about the software side too much, as i dont want to give attackers attack angles.
The Balisong Wiki is running on Arch Linux and uses MediaWiki.

Too many users or images that are too large, can cause the Balisong Wiki to run out of memory, as the current server only has 1GB of RAM. This will crash the server. To address this issue, I've implemented a basic fix: the server now monitors the web service and automatically restarts it, if it detects a crash. However, this wasn't always sufficient, as the entire device would occasionally become completely unresponsive. To mitigate this, I added another safeguard, the server now attempts a full system restart every day at 00:00 CET, in hopes fixing lockups by restarting the device.