[Wikipedia-l] On forking

[Daniel Mayer]

On Tuesday 09 July 2002 02:27 pm, Lee wrote: 
> But even so, I'm not sure a fork is such a bad thing (or to 
> be clear, I don't think it's bad if some other group owns one 
> of the foreign Wikis--I do think it's bad to have to separate 
> ones). 

To be clear, what I meant by "fork" was that there are two or more projects 
doing the exact same thing in the same language (in this case, two Spanish 
language FDLd encyclopedia's with the same darn editing rules and very 
similar policies). 

So long as the underlying software is compatible so that things like inter 
wiki links work, then it doesn't matter that a particular language wiki is 
not on the same server as other languages or not (would be nice to have all 
languages with the same software soon...). My main point was that if efforts 
between the two Spanish wikis were combined, then that wiki would grow even 
faster and have even better quality articles. 

Speaking of forking Lee, do you have any idea if Enciclopedia Libre Universal 
en Español plan on forking the php codebase? -- that too would be an 
unfortunate duplication of effort (in the same way as it would be unfortunate 
if Linux forked).   


On Tuesday 09 July 2002 02:27 pm, Jan Hidders wrote: 
> Is that really such a big problem? I know it wastes effort but we can still 
> copy articles from them and vice versa, right? 

Yes, all text on either side can be copied back and forth because of the FDL 
(not sure about the link -- I thought that was an encouraged condition and 
not a requirement?), but merging articles is time consumming and wouldn't be 
needed if there were only one Spanish language FDLd wiki encyclopedia 
project.  


On Tuesday 09 July 2002 05:45 pm, Anthere wrote: 
> I know some of us seem to consider forking later on a 
> sort of natural occurrence. Others do not... 

On Tuesday 09 July 2002 05:45 pm, Brion wrote: 
> I personally would have no real objection to an _amicable_ fork, in 
> which a group runs their own server but we all work together on matters 
> of mutual interest: use of the name, integration/linking between 
> languages, sharing updates to the software, etc. 

Could not have said it better myself.  

--maveric149