How to fork a wiki Options

[emesee]

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.

[CharlotteWebb]

You left out the all-important detail of how to get other people to contribute to your site rather than to Wikipedia, and how to keep it from degenerating into a grudge site being colonized primarily by unpersons banned from TOW, etc.

If two trees diverge in a yellow wood, but not even Robert Frost visits your wiki, is it still a fork?

[Eva Destruction]

You left out the all-important detail of how to get other people to contribute to your site rather than to Wikipedia, and how to keep it from degenerating into a grudge site being colonized primarily by unpersons banned from TOW, etc.

If two trees diverge in a yellow wood, but not even Robert Frost visits your wiki, is it still a fork?

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.

[anthony]

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.

Based on what? The court cases I've read have suggested that you'd be protected by Section 230.

[Eva Destruction]

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.

Based on what? The court cases I've read have suggested that you'd be protected by Section 230.

It would depend on interpretation. The "Protector of Wikipedia" line of s 230 is "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" – liability would come down to the interpretation of "another information content provider". As has been often remarked, Wikipedia itself is on fairly shaky ground should anyone bring a full legal challenge – and all this is dependent on the site being hosted in the US with its lax libel laws (a UK or French-hosted Wikipedia would last about 10 minutes in the libel courts, for example).

(adding to clarify what I mean) – Wikipedia's defense against libel actions (as with Myspace, Facebook, Livejournal etc – and WR itself for that matter) is that it's a "passive" host on which other people post comments and that it while it can moderate comments after they're posted it has no control over what people initially post. You, on the other hand, would be actively choosing to import the potentially defamatory material.

This post has been edited by Eva Destruction: Tue 5th May 2009, 2:55pm