2005-06-09

We've got some technical information on Migration, but I think we need to talk about how oddwiki will facilitate migration from a social point of view. This throws up some questions:

Imagine someone wants to start up a wiki. They are intending to try hard to make it popular. If they succeed in building a sizeable community, they will want to host it themselves (exactly what the oddwiki idea caters for). To encourage this use, I think we need to make some promises to people who are thinking of setting up a wiki here. We need to promise to help shove the fledgling community out of the nest, when the time comes. We need to promise not to allow the community to continue using oddwiki, once the decision has been taken to leave. We need to promise to set up redirects, so old links to oddwiki will wind up at the new wiki.

But then… who decides when the wiki should fly the nest? This is where it could get tricky. Again we could promise to give the original wiki creator this decision (thereby encouraging more wiki creators). But what if this new community doesn't want to go. This is conceivable, if the creator is saying "RIGHT! I'm migrating it my new webserver. It's a crappy slow websever. I'm having banner adds, and all content is under a 'belonging to me' licence"

Does the existing community have a right to refuse to leave oddwiki? And do they legally have a right copy the content and fork the wiki elsewhere? (I can't see anything about licencing on oddwiki. I know it's a bit boring to talk legalities, but I'm curious about your position on this) In some cases it might seem reasonable if the answer was 'yes', but spare a thought for the poor old wiki creator, who went to the trouble of setting it up and promoting it in the first place.

Of course I'm only talking about that rare minority of cases, where a wiki actually attracts a significant community of contributors. Mostly oddwiki will be full of small wiki ideas which dont take off in a big way (but which still have good content). I think we need some kind of policy, along the lines of…

"oddwiki will help to redirect a wiki to a new server, if and when the original creator wishes to do this, if (A)there is no significant commmunity, or (B)the community agrees to the move, or (C)against the wishes of the community, but only if the new host meets certain criteria in line with a conflict resolution procedure"

– HarryWood - 9th June 2005

Good questions, all of them. I'm not sure we really want to solve them, however.

• Redirects – good point. Technically, I don't think the 100% solution is feasible. What we offer is that people can delete all their pages, and leave a note on their homepage, which is not deleted. And when asked, I could lock such wikis. Thus, not all links will redirect, but at least people will be informed if they take the time to look around. As to the small number of people that actually told us that their experiment was over (I remember two at the moment), none of them asked us for redirects, and one of them left a note on their homepage.
• Community refuses to go – good point. I think we will have to listen to them, and give them more time if they want to find a different place than the one the founder planned to use. I think we can expect them to know that they will have to leave eventually, so this is an ordinary social situation where politeness requires them to leave as soon as possible, and politeness requires us to let them resolve their issues as long as necessary.
• Conflict resolution procedures – good point. There are none. If common sense is not enough, then I fear we cannot help. If people start disrupting our operations (technically or socially), I think we will just declare them unwanted and force them to leave. Do you think Oddwiki is public property? I think I will treat it as private property. I help administer the wiki, and the site is owned by LionKimbro. He pays for the server, the uptime, the bandwidth – it is his property as far as your right to create and use a wiki in this system goes.
• Licensing – good point. If the founder of a wiki does not take care (and we don't say anything about it in our Startup page), then all the content will be protected by copyright. No copying to other sites unless the authors agree to it. Should we provide even more advice, such as suggesting a license and adding some instructions to the DefaultHomePage?

Thanks for the thoughtful comment! – AlexSchroeder