Good point - risk management isn't just about technical disaster - geopolitical issues are actually a much greater long term risk

On 8/15/2011 2:04 AM, foundation-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:

The primary value of a fork(s) is not financial or technical, but epistemological. We are the big kid in the playground, and that has a significant effect on the nature of the content. When we work so hard to build an aura of reliability readers begin to depend on us. Paradoxically, that's not always good. If we are so reliable, the reader is not motivated to look elsewhere for alternatives. Natural human laziness is bad enough by itself. We too easily fall into the trap of treating Group POV as Neutral POV. Forks, would develop their own versions of NPOV, and end up with very different results that are as easily reliable as ours, but still different. It becomes up to the reader to compare corresponding pages, and draw his own conclusions on the matter at hand.

We should not be viewing forks as inherent evils to be resisted at all costs. We should be encouraging them, and helping them.