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

[Fred Bauder]

> On 15/08/11 18:14, Fred Bauder wrote:
>>> I'm just trying to evaluate the scale of the risk here. The amount of
>>> resources that we need to spend on this should be proportional to the
>>> risk.
>>>
>>> -- Tim Starling
>>
>> That technical staff have effective power to decide whether a fork is
>> justified is reason enough.
>
> I'm not in a position to actually allocate resources to this or to
> decide whether it's justified. I'm asking these questions mostly for
> my own curiosity, and in case someone seeks my opinion on it in the
> future.
>
> When you launched Internet-Encyclopedia, I was very positive about its
> utility. Brion and I gave it all the support it needed. The "green
> link" feature in particular required Wikinfo to be whitelisted in the
> server configuration so that it didn't get blocked for its high
> request rate. I reviewed Proteus's fork of MediaWiki to see if there
> were any changes that we could reincorporate. So it's not like I'm
> staunchly anti-fork.
>
> -- Tim Starling

Tim,

Yes, your help was greatly appreciated.

Here's the conclusion I've come to though. We need to get the software
good enough, and simple enough, that it is firmly in the background.
Mediawiki is like an old DOS computer that constantly drags you into
programing mode, particularly if you fork. We need the equivalent of a
Macintosh that almost anyone can use effortlessly. The emphasis needs to
be on content, not on trying to figure out extensions and templates.

Fred