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I know this is weak medicine, but Wiki is CC licensed.

That means it can be forked if it turns out they are doing more than protecting people from harassment. For now let's give them the benefit of the doubt.

It also has public change logs, so it is easy to have a debate about the presence/absence of censorship.




> I know this is weak medicine, but Wiki is CC licensed. That means it can be forked if it turns out they are doing more than protecting people from harassment.

Wikipedia's protective moat isn't the licensing, it's the SEO. You can't compete with that under any circumstances. There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Fork all you want, your content will never show up in Google's results with a high ranking, and as such you won't get a large enough audience or editor base to matter.


I get a half of my google results for many topic with wikipedia copies, either mildly or marginally disguised.


>requires that any derivative of works from Wikipedia must be released under that same license, must state that it is released under that license, and must acknowledge the contributors (which can be accomplished with a link back to that article on Wikipedia).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks

Looks like you're right. Forking Wikipedia is pretty easy from a licensing perspective.


I like how cc requires making the materials available but it is served as a giant multi TB turd mostly made up of cruft. (think: custom templates) It is also funny how people seem to think anonymous users who cant be identified own copyright to anything. WP has refused to set up a proper identification process.

  2 angry alcoholics > nobel laureate
A [shame] link back to wp? why? They don't own the rights and they are not a reliable host for crediting sources. If WP vanishes you are still obligated to name the authors. (who have no name or address)

The idea is of course nice. It would be more fun if one could easily export a category in various popular formats.


It is actually a very strong medicine, but good luck coordinating a critical mass of core contributors and moderators towards a single effort. Expect the new policies to have the "unacceptable" writeups also excluded from revision histories so that they could not be easily rehabilitated in competing forks.



Your link doesn't work, but if wikipedia didn't want its name abbreviated it should have chosen a shorter one.

Like hacker vs cracker I suspect this is a battle you're going to lose in the long run.


Forking Wikipedia is practically unfeasible without a huge organizational effort. And will probably result in loss of credibility of both branches.

The public logs are there since ever, so does the censorship (some amount of it).


Are there db dumps available with article edit histories? I know that there are article backups you can download, but I don't know the limits or extents of those archives.


Yes, you can get the whole history. Its huge though


No surprise there. Wikipedia predates most sites of comparable traffic by a good five years.


Does it contains content that has been deleted for violating copyrights?




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