[Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki

[Sj]

> Andre Engels wrote:
> > Is this good? From one point of view it is. We have two parties, and
< > we find a compromise...

I agree with Andre's observations here; community discussions in the
past do not seem to have distinguished between [the need for separate
views for different contributors, and different policies for different
subprojects] and [the need for separate wikis/databases, technical
arrangements, lists of administrators, interlang links].

On Sun, 2 Jan 2005 03:18:21 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Certainly, wiktionary is now maturing into something that it
> could never have been without being separate from wikipedia, and so
> having a separate reference work makes complete sense there.

Being separate from -- in the sense of having its own policies,
community discussion areas, and goals -- does not necessarily require
having a separate wiki.

There are a number of wiki subprojects that set their own local
policy, have their own microcosmic village pumps and portal pages,
have dedicated contributors who use their watchlists to efffectively
create a specialized Recentchanges list without losing the ability to
tap into the 'global' recentchantes, etc.
 
It makes a lot of sense to me, theoretically, to have the all projects
working on collective reference works share a single wiki [database]. 
Then to rethink namespaces in such a way that there is no extra fear
of naming conflicts; then to use URL-rewriting to take advantage of
the shorthand of the many top level domains we have, so that no URLs
break (or even redirect).   I can see keeping non-reference projects
like, say, some kind of resource for original research, being separate
(that is, actively preventing users and readers from seeing a global
recent changes that suggests that such work is like the reference work
going on elsewhere).

It should be possible to do this without changing the user experience
for readers and users, except for the fact that all of the "external"
links that currently go to other wikimedia projects would become
blue/red internal links.

But many internals would change; the database schema, calculating
statistics, etc.  And this system would ideally work cleanly with the
hazily-defined namespace policies of Wikibooks.  I don't know that
this is something worth spending time on this year, but perhaps, in
the spirit of the Great Database Schema Change of 2005, we can start
discussing whether this would be a good idea in the future.

-- 
+sj+