4 ms·

I wonder why nobody has forked Wikipedia yet. There's no restriction to doing so, is there? To avoid having super high server costs, it could even be a "soft-fo

I wonder why nobody has forked Wikipedia yet. There's no restriction to doing so, is there? To avoid having super high server costs, it could even be a "soft-fork", where only the pages which are edited are stored locally, all other content is fetched from the original. If these restrictions are really affecting the quality of the articles in Wikipedia, we'll see the quality of the articles on the fork grow, at which point they can be merged back by Wikipedia.

muuh-gnu 12y ago
> I wonder why nobody has forked Wikipedia yet. Wikipedia _was_ forked, several times. The reason you dont seem to know about them are: 1. The added utility was not sufficient to make an impact strong enough to pull people away from wikipedia. 2. The added no utility to the fork at all or made things bad at Wikipedia even worse. Wikipedia is like democracy, it is the worst free encyclopedia we have, except all the others.
- mxfh 12y ago
  Forking is not enough, the whole thing has to get out of it's wiki format and be transitioned into some kind of purpose built system, the wiki approach was great for growing fast but is hell to maintain or understand when used for content and administration in parallel. The best thing I could think of would be a streamlined kind of git with repositories for every article and an easy to understand ticketing system and maybe the possibility to have concurrent versions of articles one branch for the deletionist and notability enforcing kind and another inclusive one.
  - sparkzilla 12y ago
    See my comment above. We have solved most of the problems for crowdsourced news-based pages and biographies at Newslines. We cut out almost all Wikipedia's problems by focusing on newsworthiness as the standard of inclusion; letting users create posts based on news events, not long-form articles; and using a standard post approval process.
- philipn 12y ago
  I suspect the alternative is really just more material on "long-tail," open-contributor sites that cover many of the topics that Wikipedia does, but in more detail and with different policies. For instance, the http://newslines.org http://newslines.org site linked above, or the non-profit that I help run, LocalWiki (https://localwiki.org https://localwiki.org). Let Wikipedia just be a really great general-purpose encyclopedia -- it's not supposed to replace the entire web.
pm24601 12y ago
Why fork wikipedia? Who has the time to compete against something that is free and has mindshare?

muuh-gnu 12y ago

> I wonder why nobody has forked Wikipedia yet. Wikipedia _was_ forked, several times. The reason you dont seem to know about them are: 1. The added utility was not sufficient to make an impact strong enough to pull people away from wikipedia. 2. The added no utility to the fork at all or made things bad at Wikipedia even worse. Wikipedia is like democracy, it is the worst free encyclopedia we have, except all the others.

mxfh 12y ago
Forking is not enough, the whole thing has to get out of it's wiki format and be transitioned into some kind of purpose built system, the wiki approach was great for growing fast but is hell to maintain or understand when used for content and administration in parallel. The best thing I could think of would be a streamlined kind of git with repositories for every article and an easy to understand ticketing system and maybe the possibility to have concurrent versions of articles one branch for the deletionist and notability enforcing kind and another inclusive one.
- sparkzilla 12y ago
  See my comment above. We have solved most of the problems for crowdsourced news-based pages and biographies at Newslines. We cut out almost all Wikipedia's problems by focusing on newsworthiness as the standard of inclusion; letting users create posts based on news events, not long-form articles; and using a standard post approval process.
philipn 12y ago
I suspect the alternative is really just more material on "long-tail," open-contributor sites that cover many of the topics that Wikipedia does, but in more detail and with different policies. For instance, the http://newslines.org http://newslines.org site linked above, or the non-profit that I help run, LocalWiki (https://localwiki.org https://localwiki.org). Let Wikipedia just be a really great general-purpose encyclopedia -- it's not supposed to replace the entire web.

pm24601 12y ago

Why fork wikipedia? Who has the time to compete against something that is free and has mindshare?