On Fri, 12 Aug 2011 13:32:43 +0100, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: but to My point is that making it easy to fork does not create good competitors. Good competitors come from elsewhere. And they will come, if we do not deploy WISIWIG, not lower the entrance barrier for novices, not make it harder to troll out respectable users, and not find a way to make connections to academia or otherwise considerably improve the quality. Cheers Yaroslav

On 12 August 2011 13:47, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: That assumes it's actually worth editing wikipedia on any scale at this point. For most normal applications of encyclopedias it probably isn't. -- geni

On 12 August 2011 20:24, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes but those don't have much to do with normal applications of encyclopedias. -- geni

On 12 August 2011 20:59, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: You appear to be confusing "articles needed for normal applications of encyclopedias." and encyclopedic. [[Nabu-apla-iddina]] is encyclopedic, a Babylonian king no less, however history shows that encyclopedias can function just fine without having an article on him. -- geni

+1 for the need to make it easy to fork (I suggested this back in 2010 in Gdansk during the barcamp session.) "Yaroslav M. Blanter" <putevod(a)mccme.ru> writes: Forks are not only a matter of _competition_ between branches, but also a matter of _freedom_. The whole point of using CC-by-sa in WM project is to allow people to reuse and to improve the content, either within the projects or outside the projects. No doubt that the content is being massively reused outside the WM project. But I doubt the content is improved outside the project -- which is what matters most to me. Various communities disagree on what "improve" means, so it would be great if WM could let those communities to fork the projects' content and start new ones. The easiest way I can think of is a Mediawiki plugin that allows people to grab content from WM projects and create new pages with this content. -- Bastien

On Sat, Aug 13, 2011 at 4:53 AM, emijrp <emijrp(a)gmail.com> wrote: Something like this.. ? http://wikimedia.org.au/wiki/Proposal:PersonalWikiTool -- John Vandenberg

2011/8/15 David Richfield <davidrichfield(a)gmail.com>om>: Pretty much. It's not urgent - I do understand we're chronically underresourced - but I think it's fairly obvious it's a Right Thing, and at the very least something to keep in the back of one's mind. - d.

Adding ads (for instance, Google ads) to the Wikipedia pages? (I do not mean WMF is planning to do this, but as a remote possibility - why not?) Cheers Yaroslav

On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 09:38, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: I don't think this is a requirement. Wikipedia have to support enormous amount of traffic while a fork don't expect such. I'm sure I could easily fork enwp with just one machine, and handle a few hundred visitors a day, or even in an hour. I believe Fred Bauder have made a fork of a kind (yes I know it used a different method) and I guess he do see the traffic stats and resource requirements to do that. ;-) By the way someone asked about reasons to fork. A very possible reason could be when an established ("senior") editor gets mass attacked and/or banned and/or having to work in a very hostile environment. (Not just a few editors avoid commons for the very reason that they feel images tend to disappear without warning. I try to handle these cases, nevertheless, but I know it happens. It happens on enwp often that religious/nationalist pressure drives editors away, and if someone is involved enough s/he may feel the need to fork and continue the work with a different ruleset.) --  byte-byte,     grin

On 15 August 2011 07:51, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: I don't have a particular risk in mind, no, which is why I've been consistently saying this is not urgent. You seem to be assuming I'm saying something I'm not. - d.

Hi! If you tried reading more of the message than just From: header, you wouldn't write this bullshit. The whole topic is about ease of forking, and: a) Member of technical staff did not allege that he is making any kind of decision, he just explains that there're tradeoffs to be made b) It was not being discussed whether "resources to allow forking" are to be spent or not. The message was more about "how much" c) He also questioned if organization bylaws/format/etc is a high risk, and he solicited feedback. d) He also wanted to know what is seen as a bad foundation decision worth forking. That is more of a "how not to need a fork" rather than "how not to allow a fork". I hope you will fix your attitude. As for resources spent on ease of forking, it can go many ways. WMF could be extremely supportive of forks/mirrors/whatever. That is not just about providing a dump, that is also about allowing to query an API for page-loads of remote forks. Essentially, it could become data engine for whatever gets built on top. That is expensive, fundraising becomes inefficient, but here you are, lots of resources and a commitment to spend them just to support forks. WMF could also give initial grants and actually help on fork engineering problems ;-) WMF could also impose rules on number of articles/data size, to put editors into britannica-like editing more, where each word added is a word removed from elsewhere :-) This would keep projects way more forkable, albeit this would be a catalyst to a fork without such a restriction ;-D WMF could provide reliable/robust change feeds/distribution mechanisms, including media. Depending on a requested feature set this may be relatively expensive operation (albeit it may be more expensive to be on a receiving end at that time - it is just multitude of polling people that may be costly for WMF ;) As you see, each of these things may require lesser or bigger MTS participation at the tactical level, k'thx. Domas

On 15/08/11 18:14, Fred Bauder wrote: I'm not in a position to actually allocate resources to this or to decide whether it's justified. I'm asking these questions mostly for my own curiosity, and in case someone seeks my opinion on it in the future. When you launched Internet-Encyclopedia, I was very positive about its utility. Brion and I gave it all the support it needed. The "green link" feature in particular required Wikinfo to be whitelisted in the server configuration so that it didn't get blocked for its high request rate. I reviewed Proteus's fork of MediaWiki to see if there were any changes that we could reincorporate. So it's not like I'm staunchly anti-fork. -- Tim Starling

Hi! OK! Yes, especially if you actually are running it, all you do is sit in some black and white text screens, that definitely sucks. Yup, we need drag&drop forking support. With clouds nowadays that should be easy - you enter cloud account information (it may auto-detect password), and drag the website you want to fork onto a "drag here" target. We should definitely work on this kind of functionality. Then you click on it, and it runs, in a cloud! Emphasis needs to be on content and DRM, so that people don't copy articles without leaving 30% of their revenue to your fork. ArticleStore is going to be core essence of all content distribution, after it has been previewed on the website, of course, seamlessly integrated with reading devices, like computers. It is easy to resolve templates and extensions iOS-development way, charge community for being able to write them, that will make the remaining ones truly useful, because someone was motivated to do that. Of course, you need an approval process, but it is nothing technical, you can approve that stuff solely on moon phase or peyote effects :) Anyway, we should definitely build something like that, just don't pay attention to suicide rate. Cheers, Domas

On 16 August 2011 09:18, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: argh. That's a question, not a statement. Do we have some third party with copies of everything? I suggest the IA as they have the disk space and, as a library, rabidly archive everything they can get their hands on. (Would anyone from IA happen to be on the list?) - d.

2011/8/16 David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> I heard Internet Archive downloads dumps every 3 months (but no images). Also, some time ago I heard about a contact with Library of Congress to host dumps duplicates. No more news about that. Instead of a meteor, maybe a hurricane. Instead of a hurricane, maybe a faulty RAID. Did you hear about the RAID problem some months ago? Regards, emijrp

On 08/14/11 11:51 PM, Tim Starling 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. Ray

On 15/08/11 08:16, David Richfield wrote: I'm fairly confident it would be much easier to fork Wikipedia than OpenOffice.

Feedback: Approval based systems only work on a tiny subset of articles as they disenfranchise the vast majority of contributors who don't have a multi-tiered content approach at all. -----Original Message----- From: Tom Morris <tom(a)tommorris.org> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Mon, Aug 15, 2011 2:04 am Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] We need to make it easy to fork and leave On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 08:26, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk(a)eunet.rs> wrote: On 15/08/11 08:16, David Richfield wrote: I'm fairly confident it would be much easier to fork Wikipedia than OpenOffice. Technically, it's much easier to fork code than it is to fork wikis specially now in an era of distributed version control systems (Git, g, bzr) where everyone who checks the code out of a repository has a ull copy of the repository. The only technical infrastructure you eed is some hosting space for the repo and the other common bits you eed for software dev (mailing list, bug tracker etc.) One thing I've been thinking about from the failure of Citizendium is ow an expert community could set up their own external version of ending changes: basically a simple database of stable versions, so ny individual or group could set up a server with stable versions of rticles, then you could subscribe to a set of stable version sets - o, say, the International Astronomical Union mark a bunch of evisions of astronomy articles as stable, and if you've got the rowser plugin installed with their dataset installed, when you visit ne of those pages, it'd show you the stable version they chose. And he flipside is that if you are (in my humble opinion) a cold fusion ut or a homeopathy nut, you could find some crazy person who believes n those things to come up with his or her own set of crank stable ersions. And the stable version could be marked as checked by a particular erson from a particular institution with their real name if that is he practice in that community: perhaps in physics or philosophy or sychology or some other academic subject, having a real name person ign off on a particular stable version is fine and dandy, but in, ay, the Pokémon fan community, they don't really have the same ssumptions. (Again, one of the failures of Citizendium: you don't eed a guy with a Ph.D to approve the articles on Pokémon in the way ou might want a credentialed expert to sign off on, say, an article n cancer treatment.) The essential thing is to separate out the things that people want: ome people want "distributed Wikipedia", but why? Well, one good eason seems to be so you can have stable versions with expert versight (like Citizendium) - well you can get most of the desiderata hat led to Citizendium by having a third-party distributed approval ayer and browser plugins etc. A little bit of hacking provides a lot f opportunity for different communities to take Wikipedia and run ith it in the ways they want to. This kind of proposal would provide lot of what Citizendium was shooting for but without the oordination problem of trying to get disparate communities of people o work together in a way the CZ community kind of failed to do. onsider for instance the ethnic studies/women's studies people who idn't find Citizendium a welcoming environment.[1] Under this kind of roposal, if there is a community of people involved in ethnic studies ho want to participate in Citizendium-style expert approval, they can et up some very lightweight software and organise their approvals in hatever way fits best with their academic community norms. Essentially, in software terms, this would be like a 'packager', omeone who takes Wikipedia's output on a certain topic and marks pecific revisions or whatever as good or bad. They'd still be welcome and indeed encouraged) to participate in editing on Wikipedia in the raditional way, and ideally the community wouldn't take participation n such an enterprise against them as an editor (just as they urrently don't or shouldn't take participating in Wikinfo or itizendium or even Conservapedia against someone), and any comments hat come up in the 'packaging' process could be taken as feedback in he normal way just as if packager at Debian finds a bug with a piece f software, he or she can point that out the upstream maintainer. Feedback? [1] see http://cryptome.info/citizendium.htm and ttp://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Citizendium -- om Morris http://tommorris.org/> _______________________________________________ oundation-l mailing list oundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org nsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l