[Foundation-l] Forkability, its problems and our problems

[Tim Starling]

On 16/08/11 20:11, David Gerard wrote:
> Precis: annoy a subcommunity sufficiently, they leave in a group. Try
> to stop them from leaving (as opposed to trying to attract them back),
> they leave faster and take others with them.
> 
> This is what I mean when I say "forkability will keep us honest."

I think that we should have some other reason for being attractive to
our editors apart from fear of forking. Say, some sort of goal or
mission statement, which is helped by having a strong WMF.

One problem with using fear of forking as your primary motivation for
doing things well is that forking is not as bad as some other
scenarios. For example, our editor community could go back to playing
computer games and watching TV, instead of doing something useful, and
people could pay for their encyclopedias. Indeed, it's hard to
understand why you want us to simultaneously be afraid of it and to
make it easier.

Another problem is that forking of a large Wikipedia edition has
proven to be extremely difficult, regardless of the availability of
image dumps, so the threat is very weak. The Chinese experience should
tell us how hard it is: Baidu Baike and Hudong were able to thrive
only with the Chinese Wikipedia completely blocked in Mainland China.

-- Tim Starling