A discussion on the toolserver list brought up the question, once again,
of what would be needed to fork the projects. Because some data is
private we aren't going to be able to provide data for perfect copies,
but the content can be preserved. The question is how close we can get.
In particular I would like folks to think about how we can manage the
user account issue.
It would be very nice indeed if users could reclaim their accounts on a
copy of the project, and yet we cannot provide any outside project a
copy of the user table (which has email addresses and other useful bits
in it). And many many users don't give an email address anyways.
I'd like to hear proposals for how this could be handled. Wouldn't it
be awesome if this could be done today, and Wikipedia editors could have
editing privileges on copies of the project around the globe that
provided different experimental features? Assuming of course that there
were groups or organizations that wanted to run such copies of the
site...
Ariel