On Sat, 2002-12-07 at 01:25, Jens Frank wrote:
On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 12:11:46AM -0800, Jonathan Walther wrote:
From where I'm standing, if all the databases were folded into one wiki database, there would be no problem.
Several other language teams have split over the time, some have merged with the main project again. If joining db's some will feal that they won't be free to choose anymore.
Please comment and encourage others to comment at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_language_integration ! I want to hear from people who have concerns *so we can address them*.
It would be trivial to make partial database dumps for each language available for download, so if someone wants to exercise their right to fork and only wants to take material from one language, that's easy enough to accomodate.
Rejoining later wouldn't be more difficult than it is now; if every single contributor for that language had left for the forked wiki, we could simply replace every changed article by importing their db dump. If some people remained at Wikipedia while others worked on a forked project, we would have to integrate them.
Of course, forking isn't the only thing you can do -- getting involved and becoming part of the Wikipedia development and maintenance team to improve it where it's got problems is always an option.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)