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

[emijrp]

Man, Gerard is thinking about new methods to fork (in an easy way) single
articles, sets of articles or complete wikipedias, and people reply about
setting up servers/mediawiki/importing_databases and other geeky weekend
parties. That is why there is no successful forks. Forking Wikipedia is
_hard_.

People need a button to create a branch of an article or sets of articles,
and be allowed to re-write and work in the way they want. Of course, the
resulting articles can't be saved/showed close to the Wikipedia articles,
but in a new plataform. It would be an interesting experiment.

2011/8/12 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>

> [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.
>
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