QUOTE(CharlotteWebb @ Sun 3rd May 2009, 8:04pm)
QUOTE(Eva Destruction @ Sun 3rd May 2009, 6:45pm)
You also forgot step 5: realise that the moment you start hosting it (and consequently become the "publisher") you become liable for any libels, errors etc and for taking steps to fix them (Jimbo & pals can at least point to the fact that they try to fix errors), and also become subject to the laws of your country as opposed to Florida's comparatively lax libel laws. And while IANAL, I suspect that because you'd be actively importing any offending content – as opposed to just being the host on which other people post libels – you'd be on very shaky ground if you tried to claim s230, should anyone take exception to any of the offending material.
Hmm, do the
hundreds of known mirror sites claim (or need to claim) any kind of immunity? That's probably news to them.
How about the "scraper" sites which just load the current version of a Wikipedia page and pass it along to you (substituting their own site's name and logo, etc.)?
Those listed at
Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks/All are mostly specialist projects that have just forked a few pages and
have checked them before hosting their own versions. The mirror sites should, at any rate, not be editable and purely mirror the Wikipedia pages, and are essentially just an alternative means of accessing the main site's content. Major scrapers like
BBC Music that mirror Wikipedia pages (as opposed to using Wikipedia articles as a base on which to write their own articles) are
festooned with legal disclaimers and tend to have a policy of suspending particular articles on request if issues are raised regarding accuracy. As I understand it, what Emesee is talking about (correct me if I'm wrong) is the mechanics of duplicating the whole of Wikipedia and using it as a basis – it would be virtually impossible to even attempt to check the 2million+ articles to ensure an accurate starting point, without Wikipedia's high user base and equally high (but often ignored) casual-browser-who-quietly-fixes-an-error count. As I understand it, this was one of the main reasons Larry ditched the original plan to import-and-clean-up the whole of Wikipedia as a starting point for Citizendium.
QUOTE(CharlotteWebb @ Sun 3rd May 2009, 8:55pm)
QUOTE(Tex @ Sun 3rd May 2009, 7:45pm)
Forks can work if there's a substantial amount of people who edit in a non-malicious manner and keep pages up to date. This happens if the wiki is associated with a topic which can interest a number of people from a highly populated forum (WoW wiki, Star Wars wiki and Star Trek wiki are certainly successful, and more accurate than the wikiprojects on Wikipedia related to those topics).
So would it be possible to start a wiki based on a narrow topic (to lure the Right Kind Of People onto the ground floor) then gradually broaden its scope to include, eh... potentially everything? Has anyone ever taken this approach?
Conservapedia – which started out as a host for teaching materials for Eagle Forum University – is one that springs to mind.