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