On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 6:43 PM, George Herbert
<george.herbert(a)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.