On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 7:46 PM, Katie Filbert <[email protected]> wrote: > In 2002, the Spanish Wikipedia forked and people went to the other project. > The fork had to do with differences of project policies not license, the > fork died few years later. Spanish Wikipedia grew more slowly as a result
This is an important case study. The fork was basically triggered by the possibility of future advertising on Wikipedia not being ruled out. No plans had been made, and as we have seen, no advertising on Wikipedia ever happened. Yet the fear was enough to make a sizeable chunk of the whole Spanish Wikipedia community jump ship. End result: the Spanish Wikipedia was severely damaged, and even years later, remains well behind where it ought to be: only 650k articles, less than even Japanese and Polish, despite vastly greater numbers of Spanish speakers. It seems an apt comparison because the fundamental issues here seem to do with process, and possible future eventualities - rather than some current impassible stumbling block. Steve _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
