explain xkcd
Welcome to explain xkcd, the site that explains many of the obscure references in Randall Munroe's amazing xkcd webcomic!
Here is a tour of various entry points to the site:
- List of all comics (full) - the main series of numbered comics that usually come out thrice a week
- Category:Comics by topic - here you can filter the comics by their date, topic, characters, series, etc.
- Category:xkcd - everything xkcd that isn't a comic strip, including:
- What If? chapters - all what if? articles featured in the blog and the book series.
History
Early years
explain xkcd was originally a blog, created in July 2009 by Mike and mostly written by Jeff (@jeff_underscore), who posted explanations of xkcd comics, occasionally helped by his friend Berg (@ActuallyBerg) and by Mike. The blog gradually developed a significant following, and much interaction happened in the comments, especially for complex comics, where commenters pieced together all parts of Randall's epic comics which would have taken way too much time for Jeff to do alone.
Eventually, several people in the comments started calling for the blog to be converted to a wiki, allowing its followers to chime in with corrections and even full explanations when Jeff would have less time. While other xkcd wikis had been attempted before, none had managed to gain enough traction. explain xkcd, on the other hand, had a sizable community of commenters, which gave it better chances of pulling it off. In December 2011 Jeff trialled a new project where people could submit explanations for old comics (published prior to the start of the blog), which he posted with due credit. After a while, Jeff decided to make the switch and on 10 July 2012 this wiki was created. The announcement was made on the blog a few days later. The wiki has been gradually collecting explanations for all 3271 xkcd comics and everything xkcd-related. Soon after its creation, following some discussion, the community agreed on a new logo made by User:Alek2407, to replace the temporary one Jeff had used.
As usual with all small wikis, spam quickly became prevalent, and although it was kept out of sight of most visitors through the efforts of diligent editors (especially Lcarsos and Davidy22), spam-fighting was, for a while, the bulk of work that was being performed in the wiki, which demoralized most editors and nearly killed the community. Finally, by the end of February 2013 Jeff installed the ConfirmEdit extension (before that, Extension:ReCAPTCHA was being used, to little avail), which instantly killed off nearly all spam activity on the wiki. Users rejoiced, and the community quickly regained its health and even surpassed previous levels of activity, fuelled by new users drawn by particularly complex comics such as 1190: Time and 1193: Externalities.
As the wiki became more and more popular, the number of old unexplained comics kept shrinking. The 1000th comic explanation was created on 9 April 2013, and by 8 June 2013, all previous comics had been explained, which led to a change in focus on the wiki activity, towards expanding the incomplete explanations and filling in the explanations for comics as they came out.
Over time, the growing popularity of the wiki brought increased stress to the server, which began to fail quite often due to the high volume of visits. Jeff added donation buttons to the sidebar in an attempt to collect enough funds to migrate to a better server. Eventually, in late August 2013 an advertising strategy was devised which has been in place since.
Server crash and ownership transfer
As more comics were created and uploaded and new edits completed, the amount of remaining server storage space slowly shrank, causing repeated 503 errors and much longer load times. At the same time, Jeff, the then-owner of the wiki, went AWOL for multiple years, causing stress throughout the community as no new admins or bureaucrats could be promoted. By 2026, User:Kynde was the only remaining active administrator on the site, with User:Theusaf also occasionally contributing. Another aspect of this was that the MediaWiki version that explain xkcd ran on was not updated, remaining on a 9-year old version originally released in 2017. As an emergency form of communication, User:42.book.addict presciently created the explain xkcd:Discord server in case the site became completely unusable.
In 2026, the server began shutting down for extended periods of time. June 2026 saw the site become completely inaccessible for approximately four days before coming back online. On July 6th, 2026, the server finally ran out of storage space, effectively rendering explain xkcd read-only as any attempt to edit the wiki failed. Multiple members of the community created mirrors of the site so that editing could continue, the largest of which being explainingxkcd.com, maintained by User:Celene.
After not responding to any attempts at contact for three years, Jeff finally returned, stating in an email thread that "my time for this has dwindled to (less than) 0", and transferred all user data, server access, and domain ownership to the maintainer of explaining xkcd. The next three days saw both wikis in read-only mode while Celene imported all the data back from explaining xkcd to the original site. On July 13th, explainxkcd.com returned back to full operation with the latest MediaWiki version and a new slate of administrators. An official announcement pertaining to the site transfer was published on the site, which can be read at explain xkcd:Site Transfer Announcement