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

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
Providing help to an organisation that can be considered part of the
Wikimedia movement makes sense. The issue with Citizendium is that they
explicitly distance themselves from many of the basic corner stones of what
has made Wikipedia what it is.

Citizendium does not add anything to our own projects and given the existing
policies for new projects it is a competing project to the English language
Wikipedia and as such it is a third encyclopaedic project in the English
language. This makes for a limited offer of help ie no adoption.

The notion that Jimmy should not be involved in order to prevent
"triumphalism" is naive. Even when he is not to be involved, he will be
asked by the press to comment. He may and he will. Asking him not to be
involved is not feasible because as a board member it is his job to have an
opinion and  be part of the decision process. It should also be clear that
he will certainly not be the only one who will see this mishap of
Citizendium as a vindication of the Wikimedia model.

Giving Citizendium a breathing space for a limited time period is fine with
me. This should in my opinion be on the basis of providing them hosting on
iron. Iron separate from the WMF infra structure. When it is to be for a
limited time period, it should be plain what happens when such a time period
will be exceeded. <grin> I would even like the idea of us helping
encyclopaedia Brittanica in a similar way </grin>
Thanks,
      GerardM



On 12 November 2010 08:56, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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