[Foundation-l] Forkability, its problems and our problems

On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 22:43, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: While I agree with necessity of being able to make a fork easily, there is important message which Gustavo wanted to say, but didn't express well. Under the present circumstance, any attempt to create English Wikipedia fork could be successful just if WMF makes very-ultra-serious shit and it is not likely that it would happen. We also know how the case Encyclopedia Libre vs. Spanish Wikipedia finished. That's, again, thanks to the fact that Spanish is multinational language and if someone wants to get significant official support, it would require significant time. However, the opposite example is Hudong encyclopedia. It is obviously that Hudong is much more relevant to Chinese people just because of the fact that we still have more Taiwanese Wikipedians than Mainland China ones. A couple of months ago three admins of Aceh Wikipedia decided that it is not acceptable that they participate in the project which holds Muhammad depictions. By the project, they mean Wikimedia in general, including Wikimedia Commons. It was just a matter of time when they would create their own wiki. And they created that moth or two after leaving Wikimedia. And what do you think which project has more chances for success: the one without editors or the other with three editors? So, while the reason for leaving couldn't be counted among reasonable ones, the product is the same as if they had a valid reason. And there are plenty of valid reasons, among them almost universal problem of highly bureaucratic structures on Wikimedia projects. I can imagine even very successful fork of Wikipedia in any Balkan language. We are also more or less on the edge of successful fork of any language whose community has any kind of problem with the rest of the movement. And at some point we could have serious problem. Projects could even start without license compatibility with Wikimedia content. Yes, as I don't think that anyone would bother -- which would be the right decision because of a number of reasons -- with GFDL and CC-BY-SA violations of the encyclopedia in a language with not so much speakers. 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. Fortunate moment is that we are driving on organizational expansion and that we bought some time. There are a couple of other methods for buying time. But, if we don't use that time to fix things, at some point we would deplete available options. We would eventually have the same problems in India which we have in US; we would have the same problems on a project which would be opened in 2012 as we have today with many other projects. Note that Wikipedia wasn't a hype because it is free and open online encyclopedia. It was a hype because such thing didn't exist before. It exists now all over the Internet. And without qualitative breakthroughs, we have to do things regularly. And models exist: IBM lives, Microsoft lives, Apple lives; Sinclair is dead, SGI is dead, Sun is dead; Netscape lives as Mozilla, Amsword lives as Libre Office, Ingres lives as PostgreSQL. Hi-tech organizations -- and we are hi-tech organization -- which survived were able to catch the technological development of their competitors. And our competitors are not millions of MediaWiki installations; our competitor is Hudong (note the features [1]), but also Google and Facebook. I am not saying that they are against us, but that we have to catch their technological development if we want to survive. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudong#Features