Hi,
2012/9/27 Ariel T. Glenn ariel@wikimedia.org:
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...
This wouldn't be a problem if Wikimedia was an OpenID provider.
Also, the best way to find what is missing for a fork to be possible is probably to (try to) start a fork right now… and the first idea that comes to my mind is “where is the fork manual ?”.
Best regards,