Your two rights on Wikipedia Options

[thekohser]

I've heard it said that users have two rights on Wikipedia:

1. The right to "fork" the database
2. The right to leave the project

So, I'm thinking about forking the English Wikipedia. How exactly does one go about doing that? I thought that the Wikimedia Foundation had given up about 18 months ago with trying to produce regularly-available data dumps of the entire project, presumably because their servers were choking on the process.

Is it now incumbent on a forker of the mother database (the "mother forker") to execute the entire process from "outside" Wikipedia?

And another question -- how might one fork the Simple English Wikipedia, which has a much more manageable 25,704 articles?

Greg

[gomi]

This is one of the big lies of Wikipedia -- that you can fork it. There have been successful backups during 2007 -- as recently as December, but they get removed as soon as they are complete. There is a very small window in which to pick one up. Wordbomb has some, but I think they are old.

[EternalIdealist]

The misconception that database dumps are somehow rare or difficult to come by is one of the most persistent falsehoods. People really should bother to Google. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/rolleyes.gif)

Wikimedia db dumps

Wikipedia's page about acquiring the db