[Foundation-l] We need to make it easy to fork and leave

[David Gerard]

[posted to foundation-l and wikitech-l, thread fork of a discussion elsewhere]


THESIS: Our inadvertent monopoly is *bad*. We need to make it easy to
fork the projects, so as to preserve them.

This is the single point of failure problem. The reasons for it having
happened are obvious, but it's still a problem. Blog posts (please
excuse me linking these yet again):

* http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2007/04/10/disaster-recovery-planning/
* http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2011/01/19/single-point-of-failure/

I dream of the encyclopedia being meaningfully backed up. This will
require technical attention specifically to making the projects -
particularly that huge encyclopedia in English - meaningfully
forkable.

Yes, we should be making ourselves forkable. That way people don't
*have* to trust us.

We're digital natives - we know the most effective way to keep
something safe is to make sure there's lots of copies around.

How easy is it to set up a copy of English Wikipedia - all text, all
pictures, all software, all extensions and customisations to the
software? What bits are hard? If a sizable chunk of the community
wanted to fork, how can we make it *easy* for them to do so?

And I ask all this knowing that we don't have the paid tech resources
to look into it - tech is a huge chunk of the WMF budget and we're
still flat-out just keeping the lights on. But I do think it needs
serious consideration for long-term preservation of all this work.


- d.