[Wikipedia-l] On forking

[Brion VIBBER]

Daniel Mayer wrote:
> 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...).

For kicks, I tried adding lang links to the article on Esperanto:
http://enciclopedia.us.es/wiki.phtml?title=Esperanto&oldID=19263

The links point to the correct places, but they appear in the text 
rather than being automagically listed in the page header by language 
name. It looks like they've tweaked the code to remove the integration 
feature, but links can still be made.

 > 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.

No argument here!

> 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).

The last time I heard anything from them about the software was April 
30, when Juan Antonio Ruiz Rivas (juanan at us.es) contributed the Spanish 
localization file. Their server doesn't have special_edituser.php, which 
was added to CVS May 13, so they seem to have a version of the codebase 
from roughly that period, late April-ish.

I don't know if they're doing separate development from that codebase, 
or just not updating. Ask Juan directly, or maybe he's still on intlwiki-l.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)