[Foundation-l] Should we offer to host citizendium?

Fri Nov 12 20:13:11 UTC 2010

I suggest that we look for ways  to help them.

That is not necessarily by doing their hosting, although i don' t oppose to
it.

There are other ways to help them, for example by using our network to find
other and cheaper hosting providers, helping them to find some friendly
organization that wants to support them, or helping to find them a sponsor.

kind regards
teun spaans

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 8:56 AM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

> Should we offer to host citizendium?
>
> Okey get over the instinctive reaction.
>
> ==The background==
> Those who have read this week's signpost will be aware that
> citizendium is in significant financial difficulties. If not see the
> end of the briefly section:
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-11-08/News_and_notes
>
> Now I know we haven't exactly had the best of relationships with
> citizendium but we are if not distant allies at least interested
> observers. Their mission and much of their product at this time
> coincides with ours.
>
> ==The proposal==
>
> We should offer to host citizendium on our servers at no cost for a
> period of 1 (one) year offering a level of support equivalent to our
> smaller projects. After one year the citizendium community/Editorial
> Council is expected to have sorted themselves out to the point where
> they can arrange their own hosting. At which point we lock the
> database and provide them with the dumps
>
>
> ===The pros===
>
> *It is inline with out mission
> *It wouldn't cost very much. Given their traffic levels and database
> size the cost to host would probably be lower than some of our more
> prolific image uploaders.
> *It would be possible to effectively give them instacommons
> *Citizendium is an interesting project and gives us a way to learn
> what the likely outcome of some alternative approaches would be
> *It helps with positioning the WMF as more than just wikipedia
> *It prevents the citizendium project from dying which since they have
> useful content would be unfortunate
>
> ===The cons===
> *They may still be on PostgreSQL rather than mysql which could create
> issues with compatibility
> *Some of their community are people banned from wikipedia
> *risk of looking like triumphalism over Larry (can be addressed by
> making sure jimbo is in no way involved)
> *keeping control of the relationship between the citizendium
> community/Editorial Council and the various WMF communities
> *Handing the password database back at the end of the year would need
> to be done with care.
>
>
> All in all other than the assuming we can deal with the database issue
> I think it is something we should do. The citizendium
> community/Editorial Council may well say no but at least we will have
> tried.
>
> --
> geni
>
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