Daniel Mayer wrote:
I personally don't have a distaste for ads - they just annoy me a bit. But I do have a distaste for the thought of forks such as with Enciclopedia Libre. This is especially dangerous now that chapters are being set-up that could fund a successful fork.
If a Wikimedia chapter wants to buy servers for their language wiki to avoid slow, poor-quality service or site-wide advertising, then we should give them our blessing. We should also give them a conditional license to use the Wikipedia name, access to private SQL dumps and full technical support. And once they have their hardware set up, we can set the relevant DNS entries to point to them. We can help them with backups and redundancy with a slave database server in Florida replicating all writes. In order to allow software upgrades, maintenance tasks and future features such as shared logins, it would be nice if all the developers with shell access to the Florida servers also had shell access to the foreign servers.
Forking is a bad thing because it implies duplicate effort from editors. But I see no reason to fear distribution. The French chapter is prohibited by law from sending most of their money to Florida, so in the future it might be best for them to contribute hardware.
-- Tim Starling