[Foundation-l] Volunteer Council - A shot for a resolution

[David Gerard]

On 17/03/2008, Robert Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:

> Something of this order of magnitude did happen... at least with the
>  Spanish Wikipedia community.  It is now just a historical note, but even
>  a major fork of the community... especially something that transcended
>  multiple projects/languages would be a huge deal.  I've been involved in
>  one of those calls in the past, where I did my level headed best to try
>  and keep the community together, but it wasn't easy nor did it win me
>  any friends.


[[:en:Fork (software development)]] outlines this. The right to fork
is what keeps a project honest; with large projects, a successful fork
will end up taking a large number of developers with it. (c.f.
[[XFree86]] forking [[X.Org Server]] and taking most of the developers
with it, with considerable acrimony.) The fork of Spanish Wikipedia is
probably the most significant free content fork to date; it'd be a
damn fine thing if it *stayed* the most significant.

That said, the Foundation making sure that leaving it is possible is
one of the best things it could do to make sure its mission continues
should it be hit by a meteor (physical or legal) one day. And it's
aware of this. We have a good backup of en:wp at last ...


- d.