Man, Gerard is thinking about new methods to fork (in an easy way) single articles, sets of articles or complete wikipedias, and people reply about setting up servers/mediawiki/importing_databases and other geeky weekend parties. That is why there is no successful forks. Forking Wikipedia is _hard_.
People need a button to create a branch of an article or sets of articles, and be allowed to re-write and work in the way they want. Of course, the resulting articles can't be saved/showed close to the Wikipedia articles, but in a new plataform. It would be an interesting experiment. 2011/8/12 David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> > [posted to foundation-l and wikitech-l, thread fork of a discussion > elsewhere] > > > THESIS: Our inadvertent monopoly is *bad*. We need to make it easy to > fork the projects, so as to preserve them. > > This is the single point of failure problem. The reasons for it having > happened are obvious, but it's still a problem. Blog posts (please > excuse me linking these yet again): > > * http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2007/04/10/disaster-recovery-planning/ > * http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2011/01/19/single-point-of-failure/ > > I dream of the encyclopedia being meaningfully backed up. This will > require technical attention specifically to making the projects - > particularly that huge encyclopedia in English - meaningfully > forkable. > > Yes, we should be making ourselves forkable. That way people don't > *have* to trust us. > > We're digital natives - we know the most effective way to keep > something safe is to make sure there's lots of copies around. > > How easy is it to set up a copy of English Wikipedia - all text, all > pictures, all software, all extensions and customisations to the > software? What bits are hard? If a sizable chunk of the community > wanted to fork, how can we make it *easy* for them to do so? > > And I ask all this knowing that we don't have the paid tech resources > to look into it - tech is a huge chunk of the WMF budget and we're > still flat-out just keeping the lights on. But I do think it needs > serious consideration for long-term preservation of all this work. > > > - d. > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l