@simon yes, that’s why I said mirror and not fork, thanks for assuming I’m an idiot

@raulmatias no, that’s a worst-case scenario: exposes WMF to local laws/pressure, and keeps WMF as a single point of failure.

@bvibber @davidgerard also good news, traffic is falling off a cliff so even if your goal were to split traffic 50-50 with the official site (unlikely for a variety of reasons) that’s 20% less outbound bandwidth to pay for than this time last year 🤪

@davidgerard @bvibber @iain I would settle for “robustly and independently mirrored” right now.

@Profpatsch there are no deliberate, complete, formal mirrors that I know of. Archive might have one?

@davidgerard @bvibber @gedankenstuecke yeah, there’s a lot of things that could be done very differently (and very incrementally) if you’re trying to make Wikipedia independently available rather than cloning WMF.

(Might even be the first-best time now, since funding for sovereignty is more plentiful and there are more potential technical partnerships.)

The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016.

The second-best time is today.