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

[Peter Gervai]

On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 09:38, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> A comprehensive fork would probably need ad revenue more than the WMF
> unless it has deep pockets to get it going.

I don't think this is a requirement. Wikipedia have to support
enormous amount of traffic while a fork don't expect such. I'm sure I
could easily fork enwp with just one machine, and handle a few hundred
visitors a day, or even in an hour. I believe Fred Bauder have made a
fork of a kind (yes I know it used a different method) and I guess he
do see the traffic stats and resource requirements to do that. ;-)


By the way someone asked about reasons to fork. A very possible reason
could be when an established ("senior") editor gets mass attacked
and/or banned and/or having to work in a very hostile environment.
(Not just a few editors avoid commons for the very reason that they
feel images tend to disappear without warning. I try to handle these
cases, nevertheless, but I know it happens. It happens on enwp often
that religious/nationalist pressure drives editors away, and if
someone is involved enough s/he may feel the need to fork and continue
the work with a different ruleset.)

-- 
 byte-byte,
    grin