[Foundation-l] Wikimedia too centralised? (was Re: Attribution by URL reasoning?)

[David Gerard]

[I've changed the subject line.]



2009/3/11 Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se>:

> If the content is free, people don't need to drink from our
> watertap. It's the water that's important, not the tap. We could
> have a minimal webserver to receive new edits. Serving replication
> feeds to a handful of media corporations (who might pay for it!)
> should be far cheaper than to receive all this web traffic.  Some
> universities might serve up ad-free mirrors. We could be the
> Associated Press instead of the New York Times, the producer
> instead of the retailer.
> Or is the fact that we spend so much to maintain the 7th most
> visited website an admission to the fact that the space between
> the copies actually has a great value to us? A value that will be
> strengthened by cementing its URL and/or the name Wikipedia
> (attributing the project) into the new license?
> I'm not against that. I will go with whatever. I'm very flexible
> and I still think this is a very fun technical experiment. But I
> think the change is worth some consideration.


This is somewhat true.  MediaWiki still needs a bloody huge central
database server (or three) and so it has them.

I suppose the place to ask your question is on wikitech-l.

Being able to duplicate the infrastructure is necessary for forking to
be meaningful:

http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2007/04/10/disaster-recovery-planning/

I'm not sure anything listed there has meaningfully changed in the
last two years.


- d.