On 16 August 2011 10:59, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
That leads us to the serious dead end: We want forkability because of our principles. We could potentially lose parts of our movement. According to our principles, the only way to protect the movement is to be attractive to editors more than potential forks could be. And that's our structural problem: we are losing that battle since ~2007 and changes which we are making are too slow and too small. And that opens the space for even worse scenario. The last hope for societies in such decline is to impose martial law and try to fix things by not so pleasant methods. The only problem is that we are not society. Nobody would be killed because of Wikimedia fall and no economy would be destructed. More importantly, when people see harsh methods imposed (and one of them would be forbidding [easy] forkability), they would start to leave the project, which would just catalyze the fall.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_%28software_development%29
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."
- d.