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[Chad]

I don't necessarily agree. As Mark pointed out, the trick
is just getting enough editors over to help you get started,
the readership isn't an immediate necessity. If those
editors can establish themselves well and build up the
infrastructure, they can do it.

The trick is offering a product that's better than the original,
even if it doesn't have the same name.

-Chad

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Mike Godwin <mgodwin at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>  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
>
>
>
>
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