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.