Man, Gerard is thinking about new methods to fork (in an easy way) single articles, sets of articles or complete wikipedias, and people reply about setting up servers/mediawiki/importing_databases and other geeky weekend parties. That is why there is no successful forks. Forking Wikipedia is _hard_.
People need a button to create a branch of an article or sets of articles, and be allowed to re-write and work in the way they want. Of course, the resulting articles can't be saved/showed close to the Wikipedia articles, but in a new plataform. It would be an interesting experiment.
2011/8/12 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com
[posted to foundation-l and wikitech-l, thread fork of a discussion elsewhere]
THESIS: Our inadvertent monopoly is *bad*. We need to make it easy to fork the projects, so as to preserve them.
This is the single point of failure problem. The reasons for it having happened are obvious, but it's still a problem. Blog posts (please excuse me linking these yet again):
- http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2007/04/10/disaster-recovery-planning/
- http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2011/01/19/single-point-of-failure/
I dream of the encyclopedia being meaningfully backed up. This will require technical attention specifically to making the projects - particularly that huge encyclopedia in English - meaningfully forkable.
Yes, we should be making ourselves forkable. That way people don't *have* to trust us.
We're digital natives - we know the most effective way to keep something safe is to make sure there's lots of copies around.
How easy is it to set up a copy of English Wikipedia - all text, all pictures, all software, all extensions and customisations to the software? What bits are hard? If a sizable chunk of the community wanted to fork, how can we make it *easy* for them to do so?
And I ask all this knowing that we don't have the paid tech resources to look into it - tech is a huge chunk of the WMF budget and we're still flat-out just keeping the lights on. But I do think it needs serious consideration for long-term preservation of all this work.
- d.
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