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

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

On Fri, 12 Aug 2011 11:55:47 +0100, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>
wrote:
> [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.
> 

I do agree that the monopoly, at least in this case, is a bad thing, but I
do not see why stimulating creation of the forks would be the best way to
create competition. As far as I am concerned, the only real competition to
us comes from Chinese projects like Baidu, and not from many Wikipedia-like
forks or not even from Google Knol.

Cheers
Yaroslav