[Foundation-l] Should we offer to host citizendium?

[geni]

Should we offer to host citizendium?

Okey get over the instinctive reaction.

==The background==
Those who have read this week's signpost will be aware that
citizendium is in significant financial difficulties. If not see the
end of the briefly section:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-11-08/News_and_notes

Now I know we haven't exactly had the best of relationships with
citizendium but we are if not distant allies at least interested
observers. Their mission and much of their product at this time
coincides with ours.

==The proposal==

We should offer to host citizendium on our servers at no cost for a
period of 1 (one) year offering a level of support equivalent to our
smaller projects. After one year the citizendium community/Editorial
Council is expected to have sorted themselves out to the point where
they can arrange their own hosting. At which point we lock the
database and provide them with the dumps


===The pros===

*It is inline with out mission
*It wouldn't cost very much. Given their traffic levels and database
size the cost to host would probably be lower than some of our more
prolific image uploaders.
*It would be possible to effectively give them instacommons
*Citizendium is an interesting project and gives us a way to learn
what the likely outcome of some alternative approaches would be
*It helps with positioning the WMF as more than just wikipedia
*It prevents the citizendium project from dying which since they have
useful content would be unfortunate

===The cons===
*They may still be on PostgreSQL rather than mysql which could create
issues with compatibility
*Some of their community are people banned from wikipedia
*risk of looking like triumphalism over Larry (can be addressed by
making sure jimbo is in no way involved)
*keeping control of the relationship between the citizendium
community/Editorial Council and the various WMF communities
*Handing the password database back at the end of the year would need
to be done with care.


All in all other than the assuming we can deal with the database issue
I think it is something we should do. The citizendium
community/Editorial Council may well say no but at least we will have
tried.

-- 
geni