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Distributed wikis

The “right to fork”, a consequence of the “hack on copyright” that is copyleft licensing, helps keep open source and open content project leaders honest. Forking is a political act as much as a version control command, and it used to be that both were a big deal. But now that distributed version control systems (DVCS) have made forking trivial, are there implications for the political act as well? How does political forking work within collaborative prose text projects (i.e. wikis)? English Wikipedia is so large as to be practically unforkable - it essentially has an unassailable monopoly, and unchecked power, in the English language encyclopedia market. One of the core Wikipedia rules is “one topic, one article”, which would seem to prohibit forking, but could we adhere to this principle and still take advantage of DVCS? Can a community be forked while keeping the shared project goals intact?

Audience members will benefit from a grasp of version control, distributed version control and the workings of wikis and Wikipedia.

Slides Video

Presenter

Brianna Laugher spent four-odd years of her life editing Wikipedia and is still recovering (obviously). Her day job is writing Python and not, funnily enough, philosophising about wikis. She blogs at http://brianna.laugher.id.au/blog/ .