--- Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
That's very pompous of you, Daniel.
Ah, starting off with an insult.
If I recall correctly, when a similar advertising debate occurred some time back, there was a major fork (monolingual) which now houses a substantial number of articles and users, and although that debate passed is still separate and competes for attention and visits with the corresponding Wikipedia.
I'm very aware of the Spanish Wikipedia fork - I was here when it happened and I led an unsuccessful attempt to remerge the projects some months later. That fork hampered the development of the Spanish Wikipedia for some time, but now the tide has turned and the Spanish Wikipedia is growing very fast with over 40,000 articles and Enciclopedia Libre is growing slowly with just over 27,000 articles.
This combined with the existence of other much less-successful wiki forks, gives us our only data on the subject. On top of that is the huge momentum behind the Wikipedia brand and the fact that it is very, very popular. This kind of popularity requires a lot of money to keep things running, thus making forks even less likely to be successful.
That said, we do need to make sure we keep people reasonably happy about the way things are run. Doing that will go a long way toward making forks less likely. But they will always be possible due to the terms of our license and the fact that we cannot possibly accommodate everybody's views on how things should be run.
To assume that forks will not attract any people is very na�ve. We should always tread carefully, and try not to move into any territory that is liable to get many people up in arms and wanting to fork (ie, adding ads).
See above and re-read my previous message. Especially note its overall message that there is no need for ads in the foreseeable future.
-- mav
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