[Foundation-l] Advertisements?

[Mike Godwin]

Delirium writes:

>  I'm not sure that's really true. A fork would mainly take editors  
> with
> it at first, not casual readers, so the initial infrastructure
> requirements aren't all that large--- It's not as if a fork would
> instantly inherit Wikipedia's Google rank, name recognition, search
> bars, etc. Of course if it were a successful fork it would eventually
> attract a bigger share of the readers too, but it'd have time to  
> grow to
> meet that demand if so. And there are lots of people who can provide
> significant infrastructure anyway--- the Spanish Wikipedia fork was
> initiated at a university, and many universities have pretty good
> computing infrastructure already in place, especially when it comes to
> nearly free, nearly unlimited bandwidth. I think a more likely way a
> fork would fail is that it wouldn't attract *enough* people to  
> become a
> viable alternative, not that it wouldn't have the technical
> infrastructure to support what people it did attract.

I think this vastly understates the infrastructural issues. To me, the  
"lesson" of the Spanish fork is fairly limited. Trying to fork  
en.wiki, for example, would tend to fail unless it drew a very high  
percentage of readers almost immediately, and in order to that a large  
number of infrastructural changes would have to take place as well.

I think the Spanish fork actually tends to illustrate the difficulty  
of successful forking, and so I don't think that the threat of a fork  
should be at the center of any policy argument.  Even if you disagree  
with me about the centrality of the infrastructure issue (I don't  
think a single major university would provide an adequate  
replacement), I do agree with you that the difficulty of pulling a  
critical mass of people away is also huge.



--Mike