| It's not a bad thing in concept, and probably won't be a bad thing in execution since Roads has a pretty solid core of editors moving. They've already implemented technical improvements on AARoads, like better and newer road maps. The potential is there. It's often a bad thing in practice, much like how splitting off entirely separate social networks for specific subjects is often a bad idea. If there aren't enough people or activity, interest wanes. If the project relies on one or two heavily active editors, it collapses when they're unavailable. If you never hit critical mass for SEO or can't/don't know how to promote your content, all the work is done in a vacuum and everyone sees the Wikipedia stubs over your stuff anyway. Fandom (as in the company), as awful as it is, largely exists by virtue of participation in the subjects where there's enough interest to facilitate it; the mass wiki-farm infrastructure gives them enough of a SEO boost to dominate even some of the wikis that fork off of Fandom to escape its policies. > you can always import back the articles into Wikipedia. So maybe it can be a useful way for communities to "incubate" articles? Developing an article on a separate wiki has additional technical and administrative overhead. CC BY-SA requires attribution. Wikipedia attributes contributions by article history. The only way to import article history is via Special:Import. You have to be an admin or have import rights to use Special:Import on Wikipedia. If you can clear all those hurdles, then in theory you can import changes with the required attribution from another wiki. But if the imported changes conflict with changes made in parallel on Wikipedia, resolving them can be very contentious, especially if any of the editors involved disagree on the resolution. Or the import might fail, because Special:Import isn't particularly robust. And as the forked wiki admin, do you decide to set up scheduled imports _from_ Wikipedia to keep up with upstream? These forks often split because Wikipedia is deficient in some way beyond just editing the text. AARoads' fork's use of improved maps, for instance, would probably break the article on Special:Import because it looks like they use different wiki templates and modules. |