On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 6:43 PM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Google switching to use our search would crush us, obviously.
Doubtful. It wouldn't be terribly pleasant, but I doubt it would take down the site so easily. Alexa says google.com gets about ten times the traffic as wikipedia.org. If google.com/ redirected to wikipedia.org, I don't know if that would crash the site by itself.
As would AOL.
Wikipedia is far bigger than AOL. That would only be a 20% or 30% spike in traffic. I'm pretty sure we could handle that.
Anyway, the reason live mirrors are prohibited is not for load reasons. I believe it's because if a site does nothing but stick up some ads and add no value, Wikimedia is going to demand a cut of the profit for using its trademarks and so on. Some sites pay Wikimedia for live mirroring. So the others, in principle, get blocked.