Several discussion points have been made for or against the concept of a fork. But, regardless of method or desires, the proposed 'pedia will be a fork when it goes to print. The project being discussed can't alter this, the question is simply when and how to create the fork.

Daniel Mayer (Mav) hopes to use a 'print ready' condition or flag to allow the first section of an article to be picked up in the Concise version. This might be ideal, but I have serious doubts about doing it this way.

One example of the difference is in internal references (or q.v. entries). Even if the 'news style' first section approach is used, the first section of the full Wikipedia article would contain links to articles that don't exist in the concise version.

Another difference was raised by Mav himself, when he asked that 'we have no forks and no freezing of Wikipedia articles.' I give firm support to the idea that we should never freeze a Wikipedia article in the process of creating the Concise Print version. But the urgency of creating the print ready version imposes two areas of discipline. The first is (IMHO) that we will need to freeze an article as ready. The second was raised by Ray Saintonge (Ec), and that is that the project will probably need to restrict editing rights, something that we'd never want in Wikipedia.

When I wrote the first note about using the 'Language Wiki' method of creating a fork, I just assumed that the fork was going to happen. I think we ought to reach a clear consensus on that point before addressing the mechanics or the pro and con arguments about any given technique.

Lou Imholt (aka LouI)

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