Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
Stan Shebs wrote:
So the executive summary I get out of this is "people on en: didn't like my ideas, so I want to make a separate wiki".
I would put it a different way. "The needs of a general purpose, general audience encyclopedia differ from the needs of a professional reference work, so we should move forward in exploring solutions that meet the needs of both users while minimizing duplication of efforts."
Which is potentially a good reason, but it's not the one that Gerard gave; and I say "potentially" because although there is some very obscure and detailed scientific info in WP already, I have yet to see anybody seek to remove it because it's "too detailed for a general audience". So why is it imperative to have a new wiki to solve a hypothetical problem?
Whether a fork is good or bad depends on the real motivation, not what it looks like when it's dressed up. I've been through this a hundred times with various GNU projects, and you can't understand what will happen unless you look squarely at what's really driving people.
Stan