David Gerard wrote:
I should add: it's distinctly odd and disquieting to see so many people reacting to this with apparent denial - claiming it couldn't really be because Wikipedia has places that threat people badly enough that outsiders don't want to risk it any more, it must be some other barely-plausible reason. (I remember geni trying to make this out to be the case with the Comixpedia fork even when it was explicitly because AFD were being complete arses.) This is actually a problem and I submit that it's a serious one. Is two enough? Will it be a problem with three or four? It's not the fact of the forks, it's the reason for them.
I submit that the AfD situation with respect to forks is a symptom of our lack of consensus on WP's desired scope and depth. For instance, I and others can (and have) written articles on plants and animals for which the Google hits are down in the teens, and for which there may be only a handful of mentions in print. Arguably, these species are only of interest to specialists, and not appropriate for a "general encyclopedia", but rarely do they get listed on AfD as non-notable. Conversely, a doll manufacturer with a half-million customers could easily get listed. Is the obscure species really more "notable" then?
As long as the definition of notability gets left in the hands of AfD habitues, that's what outsiders are going to use to determine whether their interest falls inside or outside WP's scope. I don't think all forks are avoidable, for instance if specialists want to build a wiki that is used for research and thus mixes up published and original material. But right now outsiders have no page they can look at that will clearly tell them whether their planned level of depth is considered appropriate for WP, and so AfD ends up being a sort of crude measuring tool.
Stan