Should we offer to host citizendium? Okey get over the instinctive reaction. ==The background== Those who have read this week's signpost will be aware that citizendium is in significant financial difficulties. If not see the end of the briefly section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-11-08/News_a… Now I know we haven't exactly had the best of relationships with citizendium but we are if not distant allies at least interested observers. Their mission and much of their product at this time coincides with ours. ==The proposal== We should offer to host citizendium on our servers at no cost for a period of 1 (one) year offering a level of support equivalent to our smaller projects. After one year the citizendium community/Editorial Council is expected to have sorted themselves out to the point where they can arrange their own hosting. At which point we lock the database and provide them with the dumps ===The pros=== *It is inline with out mission *It wouldn't cost very much. Given their traffic levels and database size the cost to host would probably be lower than some of our more prolific image uploaders. *It would be possible to effectively give them instacommons *Citizendium is an interesting project and gives us a way to learn what the likely outcome of some alternative approaches would be *It helps with positioning the WMF as more than just wikipedia *It prevents the citizendium project from dying which since they have useful content would be unfortunate ===The cons=== *They may still be on PostgreSQL rather than mysql which could create issues with compatibility *Some of their community are people banned from wikipedia *risk of looking like triumphalism over Larry (can be addressed by making sure jimbo is in no way involved) *keeping control of the relationship between the citizendium community/Editorial Council and the various WMF communities *Handing the password database back at the end of the year would need to be done with care. All in all other than the assuming we can deal with the database issue I think it is something we should do. The citizendium community/Editorial Council may well say no but at least we will have tried. -- geni _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

My only concern is on precedent - is this a good one (we help others in the free knowledge/education world) or a bad one (our bandwidth is open to be used by any forum or website with a story to tell). Would perception and reporting in the media that we altruistically can help others (positive views) or that we take over or dominate others (even if untrue, negative views)? is there any risk that it would be seen as compromising our stance and neutrality ("Wikipedia hosts/hosted Citizendium!)

For all these reasons I'd want clarity and openness on the various "what ifs" and how they are agreed to be handled, in a way that all can see that a prior and mutually endorsed decision process was followed in that eventuality.

Hoi, Providing help to an organisation that can be considered part of the Wikimedia movement makes sense. The issue with Citizendium is that they explicitly distance themselves from many of the basic corner stones of what has made Wikipedia what it is.

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 8:13 PM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: Which cornerstone is that?

On 12 November 2010 07:56, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: I strongly support this.

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 8:56 AM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: +1

We have become the superpower, and that gives us a moral obligation to think beyond our own projects. Among the things we ought to be wary of is monoculture. If Wikipedia becomes the only source for encyclopaedic information, not only does that make the world poorer, but it makes our own projects poorer. Wikipedia needs the competition, if for no other reason than for strengthening ourselves. Hans A. Rosbach

On 12 November 2010 12:27, FT2 <ft2.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote: Probably we should ask Danese first, she'd have to make sure we had the techs and resources on hand for the hosting! We're not Rackspace and we shouldn't be. We're not ibiblio, though perhaps being that slightly would be good. In any case, hosting projects that are actually in distress (temporarily or more permanently) would be a good thing to do *if* we have the technical capacity. - d. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Probably we should ask Danese first, she'd have to make sure we had the techs and resources on hand for the hosting!

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 9:03 PM, Tomasz Ganicz <polimerek(a)gmail.com> wrote: Is that systematic, symptomatic or merely evidenced in a small set of articles? I've seen lots of people point out specific problems with their content, but we have many problem articles too.

I agree with everything except whether or not they are in line with our basic values.  They may not align with Wikipedia's values, but as a separate project they dont need to be; instead they need to fit within the core values that all our projects have in common.

Should we offer to host citizendium?

Their current problem is that they have never had to think about this stuff, ever, and suddenly find themselves with no support and desperately gathering cash to pay their ridiculously overpriced hosting ($700/mo).

There is no reason that site shouldn't run on a moderately priced VPS. I'm talking in the $100/mo range, or less, even.

These are all questions which would have to be answered before WMF should even consider getting involved.  To cover itself legally it should have the agreement of Larry Sanger, the Tides Center, and at least a majority of the Management Counsel (http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Management_Council).

On 12 November 2010 17:34, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote: This would be WMF just providing ISP services for free, no more liable than Slicehost presently are.

Yep, better offer them a short-term grant to cover hosting costs than deal with ethical and legal issues. Anirudh Bhati

We should offer to host citizendium on our servers at no cost for a period of 1 (one) year... After one year the citizendium community/Editorial Council is expected to have sorted themselves out

I'm one ocean late to this conversation, but I'll give a big +1 offering

wouldn't need to adhere exactly to all the core Wikimedia values.

I think that there is no doubt, we (interested people) have to preserve the data. *If Citizendium closes* it would be nice that WMF hosts a frozen copy of Citizendium in English Wikisource, as I requested for Nupedia articles some weeks ago

WMF are running a huge fundraising appeal now.  We can easily spare $2100 in order to pay for their current hosting arrangements for the next three months, which should give them sufficient time to get themselves back on their feet again.

So we giving another $1300 to Milton Beychok quickly, wrapped in sufficient legalese that we know it goes towards the hosting. Then he and others can sleep easy, and focus on more important things.

We are talking about chump change here.

Oh, well what's the point of that?  Might as well just give them money, as the WMF would just be purchasing those ISP services from someone else anyway.

"Geni" mentioned "offering a level of support equivalent to our smaller projects", which is most definitely *not* "just providing ISP services".

We did that with Uncyclopedia.  Wikimedia hosted it until Wikia was formed.  And we're talking Uncyclopedia here.  It's satirical value had...value.  Not quite as funny anymore. I would prefer CZ to use Wikia, which I don't think that they would ever do by the for-profit nature and relation to Jimbo.  CZ is not quite the wiki culture that we have adopted and groomed for a Wikimedia project; it's Nupedia.  So, realistically I don't quite see the meta community and the board adopting CZ.  But it is an interesting concept, and it is not difficult for such a small project to find drastically cheaper hosting costs.

We did that with Uncyclopedia.  Wikimedia hosted it until Wikia was formed.  And we're talking Uncyclopedia here.  It's satirical value had...value.  Not quite as funny anymore.

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 11:05 AM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: You know what would be kind of awesome? If there was a neutral hosting service -- by which I mean neutral hosting and technical support service -- for a whole variety of small free content projects that don't truly have the capacity to run independent technical organizations but are otherwise fairly stable. We've seen two such organizations brought up on Foundation-l just this year -- the fanhistory wiki and now Citizendium -- both of which need stable hosting, people who understand MediaWiki, and maybe even a bit of an organizational platform (like fundraising support) too. This platform could be a hosting service that was geared towards free and participatory projects, the upstart free content of the web. Such a hosting service would be a commons approach to this problem, with the costs and burden shared not just among the small projects but perhaps among the big ones too: I can see the big free culture organizations (us, Mozilla, Creative Commons, etc.) pitching in to such a thing in order to have a space to direct small projects to. This would be different from wiki hosting because perhaps all the projects wouldn't even be a wiki, as we understand them now; and there would be room for Citizendium's funky branch of MediaWiki and every other hack you can think of. And it would be neutral ground: not necessarily tied to the values of our Foundation or anyone else's. What do you think? Does such a thing exist already? Would it work? -- Phoebe

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We did that with Uncyclopedia. Wikimedia hosted it until Wikia was formed.

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 11:05 AM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: You know what would be kind of awesome? If there was a neutral hosting service -- by which I mean neutral hosting and technical support service -- for a whole variety of small free content projects that don't truly have the capacity to run independent technical organizations but are otherwise fairly stable. We've seen two such organizations brought up on Foundation-l just this year -- the fanhistory wiki and now Citizendium -- both of which need stable hosting, people who understand MediaWiki, and maybe even a bit of an organizational platform (like fundraising support) too. This platform could be a hosting service that was geared towards free and participatory projects, the upstart free content of the web. Such a hosting service would be a commons approach to this problem, with the costs and burden shared not just among the small projects but perhaps among the big ones too: I can see the big free culture organizations (us, Mozilla, Creative Commons, etc.) pitching in to such a thing in order to have a space to direct small projects to. This would be different from wiki hosting because perhaps all the projects wouldn't even be a wiki, as we understand them now; and there would be room for Citizendium's funky branch of MediaWiki and every other hack you can think of. And it would be neutral ground: not necessarily tied to the values of our Foundation or anyone else's. What do you think? Does such a thing exist already? Would it work?

On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 10:58:02PM +0100, Kim Bruning wrote: Ok, people wanting to run F/L/OSS/Wiki projects with me, send me a mail, and I'll sort things out. If citizendium wants to run  on my system then I'll at least give it a try, depending on if their bandwidth requirements are as low as I think they are.

(wondering what I'm getting into ;-)) sincerely,        Kim Bruning