[Foundation-l] Is popularity a good thing for us?

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Dec 16, 2007 11:04 AM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> On Dec 16, 2007 10:03 AM, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > +our goal is to spread this knowledge freely to all humanity. People
> > knowing of our existence is a prerequisite to them using our
> > knowledge.
>
> I think that's by far the strongest argument against intentionally
> being less popular.
>
> But it seems so easily solved.  Have two sites, one for building the
> content and a separate one for distributing the finished pieces of it
> to all humanity.

This is why I've taken such an interest in projects such as veropedia,
and why I've been pushing to do the same kind of thing (sans
advertising) for Wikibooks/Wikijunior. At the very least, it would be
a substantial boon to these two projects to offer a stable "release
version". Wikinews, also would benefit from something like this, first
because not being editable would help with their google news issues,
and they already lock old stories anyway. Maybe it's becoming
high-time the WMF considered adding such an option to some of it's
projects. Adding a sub-domain, such as "en.stable.wikibooks.org" or
even a sub-folder "en.wikibooks.org/stable" would go a long way to
helping several of the projects (and having pages which are basically
static would probably have a helpful effect in reducing server load).

--Andrew Whitworth