How to fork a wiki Options

Step 1

Sign up for hosting somewhere. You need to have PHP and MySQL installed, at least.

Dreamhost will work nicely, and quite often, you can signup, with a unique domain name for just 10 dollars, for the first year.

There are many other hosts to signup with. It will often run about 5-15+ dollars a month. If you are not getting mega ammounts of traffic, a host somewhere within this range should suffice.

Step 2

Install MediaWiki. This can have a bit of a learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, it is not super super difficult. See:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Installing_MediaWiki

Step 3

Get the XML dump of the wiki that you wish to fork.

Many can be found at:
http://download.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html

If you want to fork Commons, then see:
http://yousefourabi.com/blog/semantic-web/...ages-with-wikix

If the wiki you wish to fork does not have an XML dump available, then you still could fork the wiki, but it could be a pain. You would have to get the page list at [[Special:Allpages]] and then either export all pages manually at [[Special:Export]] (with a large wiki, this could take a long, long time) or else setup some sort script to do it (find it using Google, if it exists, or write it yourself).

Step 4

Import the dump. See:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Importing_XML_dumps

Appendix

Configure the Wiki

Then of course, configure MediaWiki at sometime in here. You may want to Import [[MediaWiki:common.css]] from the big wiki.

You can enable the use of images from Commons. See:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$...oreignFileRepos

A pretty decent overview of other good to know configurations are at:
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/MediaWiki

You may need to tweak the configuration over time. See:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

The MediaWiki wiki has a lot of information on it, and is organized perhaps pretty reasonably.

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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).

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?