Many people reach this page as, for example, http://mini.net/tcl/misdirection .
That URL was misdirected for almost twenty-four hours, though, on 10 and 11 October 2001.
The story of what happened illustrates both the fragility and resilience
of Tcl, Wikis, and the Tcl developer community.

As there's particular interest in what happened among German-speakers,
a translation appears under the title "[...]".

"[What is Tcl]"?  Tcl is an open-source programming language--not as well-known as
C or Java, but widely-used in many countries for many tasks, some of
them quite important:  management of television networks, control of
aspects of space-flight, generation of billions of Web pages, and so on (see "[Your social contribution as a Tcl'er]" for more).

While Tcl lacks the marketing muscle and "mind-share" of more popular
languages, its adepts are quite fond of it.  Along with the technical
virtues of the language, "social factors" attract many of them.
Specifically, [the comp.lang.tcl newsgroup] and its fr.comp.lang.tcl
and fj.comp.lang.tcl have the reputations for being particularly
cordial and helpful, especially to beginners with the language.

Complementing newsgroup activity is [The Tcl'ers Wiki], a collection
of over 2000 (and rising daily!) Web pages which document specific
aspects and uses of Tcl.  This [Wiki] is maintained as a collaborative,
unpaid project, by those whom the language benefits.

Independent software engineer [Jean-Claude Wippler] donates the
infrastructure which enables the Tcl'ers Wiki (along with the [Tcl Chatroom],
and many other free resources he provides).  Wippler manages all
these resources through the "mini.net" domain he has owned since 199?.

On 10 October 2001, though, the several dozen [Tcl'ers] who were using
and maintaining mini.net resources were surprised to find all their
browsing returned placeholder pages that led back to the BMW automotive company [http://www.bmw.com/].
What had happened?  While several of the details remain cloudy,
research that continued into the night confirmed that:  Wippler
had properly paid all bills and answered all correspondence from
his domain registrar; BMW had no corporate intention to "hijack"
a domain which properly belonged to another; and