In 2002 there was an attempt to fork the Spanish Wikipedia. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wikipedia-spanish-fork. There was a lot of internal pushback to the forking, but they did it. But the technical and economic issues of keeping a fork of Wikipedia up and running was one of the biggest obstacles. Wikipedia requires huge amounts of infrastructure (both technical and human maintained).
The technical infrastructure to run a fork isn't that horrendous. The real challenge is to build a community that actually wants to work on it. For Wikipedia forks, you face a big uphill fight against the network effect.
Smaller wikis sometimes have been successfully forked though. And true: Spanish Wikipedia DID pull it off, I guess due to being early. :-)
I recently went to a conference presentation that attributed this CS in joke as indicative of how the field is deeply gendered. This paper isn't by the researchers I saw, but speaks to that. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3017794
Would it not be the exact opposite of "deeply gendered" since it it has 50/50 gender representation, presents Bob and Alice as equals trying to communicate and contains exactly zero references to gender sterotypes?
I have found https://donottrack-doc.com [made by the NFB] to be helpful in thinking about data collection. If I have time at the end of this semester I'll be taking my first-year students through the first episode.
Although not short, Nathan Ensmenger's "The Computer Boys Take Over" is a fantastic history of the complicated and diverse roots of software. In the intro he states, like the comment above, that the history of software tend toward linear histories of hardware development. In his book however, he shows how management strategies, training centers, universities, corporations, and the programmers themselves attempt to control the meaning and production of software. The first chapter does a great job of summarizing this trajectory.
