On 8/13/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
And those that don't like them CAN start a fork. Wikipedia itself doesn't have to try and host multiple versions and all of that slog which makes places like everything2 so unreliable and unmanageable. It would be trivial for me to start a "World War II" encyclopedia licensed under the GDFL which used Wikipedia content as a base. The problem isn't that it couldn't be done, but that it would be hard to convince people to spend their time wrangling over my little fork rather than the big dog.
That may not be a problem. I may decide I don't want anyone else working on my GFDL encyclopedia of canals undergoing restoration.
And in fact lots of crank groups are happy to fork -- the Neo-Nazis had a wiki for awhile,
Still do although it is now a start from scratch job.
Why? Perhaps it is because the model of de-facto-centralization-with-the-opportunity-to-fork-if-you-really-want-to actually works pretty well.
Unlikely since the sucess of our other projects has been lower. More likely a lot of people on the web wanted a free encyclopedia there isn't anything else in that market area.