On 09/12/11 3:45 PM, Samuel Klein wrote:
The only other project in a similar situation is Wikispecies, where any data on species at least conceptually is welcome in a Wikipedia article on the topic.
This all makes Wikispecies the perfect fork. Its contents largely overlap the relevant Wikipedia articles, and it is free to be as different in its treatment of those subjects as it wants. It is rarely the subject of controversy, but just keeps truckin' along. The most frequent complaints are from those who would shut it down as redundant.
Wikipedias in other languages are not required to have content that is the same as English Wikipedia, though I have occasionally heard in the past that they should be better correlated. Ultimately it is this built in diversity that will keep NPOV alive. Perhaps other well defined subject areas should have forks too. Wikis are about diversity.
There is a pervasive fear that forks tend to divide an already tiny community, but I doubt that that is an insurmountable problem. Those who are content with the status quo will remain, and those who see the status quo as stagnation will move. Hopefully they will both attract new people with views in line with their separate missions. To paraphrase a popular daytime TV personality: "It is better to be from a broken wiki than in one."
Ray