Michael Everson wrote:
As I have said, I think it is no harm for them to be working away creating some content, since that content can be converted once we get my.wiki sorted out. A staged upgrade, assuming that the other site agrees (good will and all) to shut itself down when the time comes.
I am saying, from my long experience, that this is more difficult than it might seem. People working in separate groups forge social relationships that are difficult to merge. I have seen many attempts to merge wikis... it seldom works out. One of the problems is that two different groups of people will write an article "Moon" or come up with a standard table for displaying data about countries or... there are just many editorial choices which will be equally good but different.
And then people will fight in a horrible way upon the attempted merge.
If there were no choice but to do it, then I would reluctantly agree to set up zagawyi.wikipedia.org. But if there is a way to have the people who would be working there adding content in such a way that it is Unicode 5.1 compliant, while being constantly prompted to upgrade as soon as they can, then we (a) keep the community together (b) do a better job of promoting upgrades than if we had a site out there which serves the function of Wikipedia while not doing anything about pushing people to upgrade.
--Jimbo