[Foundation-l] Advertisements?

[Robert Rohde]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 2:24 PM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hoi,
> Look around, there are plenty of copies of Wikipedias as it is. Having
> money
> and having the ability and the right to host Wikipedia content has already
> produced many copies of Wikipedia all of them are largely irrelevant.
>
> The fact that you CAN create a fork, the fact that you HAVE the money to
> host a site like Wikipedia does not mean that it will have a community.
> The
> thing that comes closest to success in this is Veropedia. Then again, when
> the WMF implements "stable version" the reason for being for Veropedia as
> a
> separate wiki will be gone. I think this is what makes our friend Danny so
> edgy...
> Thanks,
>     GerardM



There are and then again there aren't a lot of forks.  Many sites simply
make static copies of Wikipedia content.  Veropedia, though something of a
special case, is largely in that category since their content isn't
editable.  Others "forks" are functionally deficient copies (e.g. no
automatic image scaling, other basic features disabled, missing images,
etc).  Most don't seem to aspire to be anything other than copies and don't
even hope to build a community.

I don't know of any full-scale forks of Wikipedia that desire to build their
own community.  (Citizendium could have done that, but they decided to start
over rather than fork.)  If you do know of some please point them out.

However, a fork, particularly a commercially financed one, that seeks to go
beyond being a mere copy by providing a differentiated feature set and
seeking to build its own community could be an entirely different beast from
any of the forks we have now seen.  And in my personal opinion, an
especially dangerous one at that.

-Robert Rohde