Mike Godwin wrote:
Geoffrey Plourde writes:
How many times does this have to be pounded
home? If you put ads in
WP or any other project, there would be a fork. Look at the Spanish
WP if you don't believe me.
I think it probably can't be pounded home anymore, because the
difficulties of forking a large project these days are understated
these days. (You can fork content, but forking decently performing
infrastructure is much harder, given the growth in our audience.)
There are reasonable arguments to be made against advertising, but I
don't think the "fork" argument holds any water. (I guess if it did
that would make it a "spoon" argument.)
I'm not sure that's really true. A fork would mainly take editors with
it at first, not casual readers, so the initial infrastructure
requirements aren't all that large--- It's not as if a fork would
instantly inherit Wikipedia's Google rank, name recognition, search
bars, etc. Of course if it were a successful fork it would eventually
attract a bigger share of the readers too, but it'd have time to grow to
meet that demand if so. And there are lots of people who can provide
significant infrastructure anyway--- the Spanish Wikipedia fork was
initiated at a university, and many universities have pretty good
computing infrastructure already in place, especially when it comes to
nearly free, nearly unlimited bandwidth. I think a more likely way a
fork would fail is that it wouldn't attract *enough* people to become a
viable alternative, not that it wouldn't have the technical
infrastructure to support what people it did attract.
-Mark