[WikiEN-l] Why there Will be a Fork (Was: Why Academics are Useful to Wikipedia)

[Geoff Burling]

On Mon, 13 Sep 2004, Daniel Mayer wrote:

> --- Geoff Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:
> > Last time I ventured my two cents concerning the print Wikipedia, the
> > response I got led me to conlcude that there was no support for forking
> > Wikipedia even in the slightest to make the content more acceptible -- which
> > is what any approval board would end up doing. Then the project seemed to go
> > into hibernation. Then it seemed that a group was working on it. Now it
> > appears we are back to discussing what should be done.
>
> What? How do you come to that conclusion? There *will* be no fork at *all* -
> the only thing that will be done is selecting one version of an article that is
> approved in some way. Any future approved version would be based on the
> development version (that is, a regular Wikipedia article which would be in
> perpetual development), not the last stable version.
>
By "fork", I mean a second version that is clearly different from the first.
Even if Wikipedia 1.0 is nothing more than a snapshop of Wikipedia on a given
date, it will be different from the dynamic, growing Wikipedia -- & thus
technically a fork.

But overlooking this case, there are other ways that Wikipedia 1.0 will
become a fork -- although a transient one. The most important one is thru the
process of review. The very fact that articles are being reviewed by a
group for that purpose implies that some articles will not make the cut; &
unless the review committee is willing to reject them without comment &
simply hope that contributors will expend the necessary work properly to
pass review, this process of rejection will inevitably lead to some
Wikipedia 1.0 material being different from the dynamic Wikipedia. (The
specific case I forsee is that some editors will feel that it is at least
as easy to make the desired revisions as to ask for them in the Talk
pages, make the changes to the 1.0 version, but forget to also make them
to the dynamic version. No matter how well intentioned, there will be
mistakes & slip-ups.)

And then there is the case where the January 1, 2005 version of an article
is flagged as approved, but changes are made so that the January 2 version
is clearly different. Will the review group then consider this new version,
or ignore it, justifiably assured that they are finished with that article?
We will then end up with a 1.0 version assembled from articles that were
never gathered together at one time.

Frankly, even if the changes to Wikipedia 1.0 are limited to correcting
misspellings, grammatical errors & other minor changes like these, there
will *still* be significant variation between 1.0 & the dynamic versions
to consider them branches of the same project.

Unless one & all is afraid to allow this possiblity to come to pass & either
(1) wait for the Featured Article project to produce enough material for a
Wikipeida 1.0, or (2) submit a snapshot of the dynamic Wikipedia as 1.0,
we have to accept as inevitable that we will have -- for a brief while --
a fork. Then after 1.0 is published, a number of Wikipedians will then
make the effort to fold back all worthwhile differences from 1.0 into the
dynamic branch -- from which 2.0 will emerge.

That is why I say that there will be a fork.

Geoff