[Wikipedia-l] Proposed fork of Wikipedia

[David Gerard]

On 04/07/2008, Thomas Larsen <thomashlarsen.wmf at gmail.com> wrote:

> I am formally proposing that Wikipedia be forked and that a new
> compendium of human knowledge, Wikipendium, be created as an
> independent alternative with a more pleasant, respectful, productive,
> constructive community with simple, clear rules and an unbureaucratic
> and responsible governance structure.


Keep the content and reboot the community? Could be interesting.

I suggest one problem you'll see is how to maintain such a huge amount
of content. Citizendium started off forking en:wp and discovered that
it was not only a daunting amount of content to maintain, but it
seemed to discourage people from working on the wiki - so they wiped
all en:wp forked content that they hadn't yet edited, and started
afresh. And they're progressing slowly but reasonably with
mostly-fresh stuff.

Consider also in community governance: there are hundreds of
Wikipedias, each operating independently - the communities are *very*
different. You'll want to look at how each works (or doesn't), what
patterns keep popping up, etc.


- d.