On 5 September 2011 17:00, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, but most mirrors are just that - mirrors. As far as I know, there is no Wikipedia mirror that actually contains extra functionality - like improved searching, wisiwyg editing, automatic translation, image filtering, or whatever else one could think of.
There have been a couple of attempts to make more-or-less curated mirrors, but they've found it hard to gain traction. It's a bit of a vicious cycle - to get readers you need lots of content, to get the resources to curate lots of content you need readers (this holds whether you rely on volunteers or whether you run it commercially). To have a chance of getting enough readers to make the project a viable going concern, you'd need to invest a lot of resources up front, banking on the assumption that: * a) your difference from the status quo is enough to attract some fraction of users; * b) the search engines would actually work in your favour rather than treating you as Wikipedia-With-Adwords Dump #41,875; and * c) it wouldn't be cloned fifty-three times by next week.
This holds regardless of what it is - whether it's stable-versioning or image-filtering, any prospective reuser is gambling on an uncertain level of takeup and a massive unknown in terms of search-engine response. If you have a target audience who you know want your specific flavour of curation, you can bypass this and go straight to them - see, for example, the Wikipedia For Schools offline projects - but it's not clear how you could then use this to bootstrap a successful internet service, since projects like this are usually selections rather than whole-content curation. Some kind of partnership with a portal might work, but I don't know if anyone's tried it yet.
In short, the current model for online mirrors serves to discourage people from putting much effort into them, and so all sorts of potentially desirable (or potentially interesting, or even potentially amazingly-bad-example) experiments with reusing our content just aren't happening.
It's not a problem we can solve (and it's perhaps not one we should be trying to solve) but it does mean we shouldn't draw any firm conclusions from the absence of any specific types of project - there's an absence of *all* sorts of projects, good and bad ones alike.