On 16/08/11 20:11, David Gerard wrote:
Precis: annoy a subcommunity sufficiently, they leave in a group. Try to stop them from leaving (as opposed to trying to attract them back), they leave faster and take others with them.
This is what I mean when I say "forkability will keep us honest."
I think that we should have some other reason for being attractive to our editors apart from fear of forking. Say, some sort of goal or mission statement, which is helped by having a strong WMF.
One problem with using fear of forking as your primary motivation for doing things well is that forking is not as bad as some other scenarios. For example, our editor community could go back to playing computer games and watching TV, instead of doing something useful, and people could pay for their encyclopedias. Indeed, it's hard to understand why you want us to simultaneously be afraid of it and to make it easier.
Another problem is that forking of a large Wikipedia edition has proven to be extremely difficult, regardless of the availability of image dumps, so the threat is very weak. The Chinese experience should tell us how hard it is: Baidu Baike and Hudong were able to thrive only with the Chinese Wikipedia completely blocked in Mainland China.
-- Tim Starling