A fork would be extremely unlikely to attract enough editors.

Forking Wikipedia is already allowed and encouraged: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks That page even has a place to list new forks so they are easy to find.

The only way to make it work would be for the existing Wikipedia to run out of money and have to shut down. That isn't happening any time soon.

Besides, nobody can find the fork anyway. Google banishes such clones to SEO purgatory immediately, from which you are basically guaranteed to never return (especially as a pure clone).

That has been true for a decade now, since the days of Stack Exchange complaining about the clones riding their CC licensed content to easy Google ranking. You can put up a perfect clone of Wikipedia, you'll get nearly zero traffic despite having millions of pages of high quality content.

Yep. Even the RuneScape wiki owner forked their own wiki after Wikia became malicious in terms of ads. It even supported by RuneScape devs themselves. And even then, the original Wikia wiki is still competing on Google SEO after a full year. And this was a real niche. Imagine a big website.

It's true that if you create a perfect fork that search engines will punish you and not even display the results, but that's not to say you can't change that. If the edit-base of a wiki moves with the fork (and this is essential), you can continue to create new content that search engines will index. If you also go back and make tweaks to existing pages, you won't get penalised. It's not a quick process, nor is it simple, but it's possible for a fork can survive, grow and even move above the original.

If Google et all detect too much cloned content on a domain, its essentially rank banned forever, for any pages whatsoever.

Having a few different pages isn't going to help.

Banned until manual override, so banned until you are substantial to either the community at large or the tech community.

See https://marc.info , its by far the best mailing list archive, popular in open source communities but it absolutely never appears on Google because it has the same content as massively SEOed crap mailing list archives like Nabble. Google has definitely manually unbanned it a few times but it seems to expire after a while.

Yes, but AFAIK all these archives have nothing to do with their primary source, so while we might all prefer no ads there is no objective way to say marc.info is the authorative source over ad ridden sources.

With Wikipedia or stack overflow, I think whoever gets the majority of participants going forward and keeps activity high could start claiming authority in an objective enough sense, and engaged participants are more mindful of organization ethics than random searchers.

This is the important point. A serious fork of Wikipedia with a large chunk of the community behind it would be dealt with manually by Google; their explicit decision making would be the relevant factor, rather than the algorithm.

Would de-indexing the clone pages from the start help, so only the improved pages are indexed?

The Internet Archive could take over the fork. I trust them more than I trust WMF.

A Fork of Wikipedia wouldn't face the insurmountable network effects. You'd have all the content ready and waiting.

Wikipedia only works because of the massive user contributions and moderation.

Losing even a small proportion of contributors could seriously affect the future development of Wikipedia.

>Losing even a small proportion of contributors

Wikipedia has been slowly losing editors for ~12 years[0].

[0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Active_editors_on_En...

But this was in the hypothetical of Wikipedia being sold or taken over. If people don't agree with the practices of the new owners and rally behind a fork trusted by the community, I expect most moderators and contributors to follow.

PR firms are really good at spinning and diffusing and confusing criticism. Not completely, but enough to split a community trying to rally behind anything that is against their interests.

The sale or takeover would start with promises that nothing would change, and then would change slowly enough that each editor would have a different breaking point and thus be too fragmented to move over at a specific point.

So the moderators count for nothing?

They count. But they aren't subject to network effects. There's no 'I can't moderate this site, because none of my friends use it' issues.

Of course there are network effects for moderators. One major reason people volunteer to moderate Wikipedia is because it's in such ubiquitous use.

A fork of Wikipedia with no community is just a content mirror and, because of network effects, you'll have an incredibly hard time attracting anyone to help out with it when they can just go to Wikipedia.

No, but you could scale up moderation in parallel with users over time.

Remember Knol? Me neither.