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I did say "extreme" effort. The cases I was thinking of were "USG or something of similar scale funds a mirror" or "WMF taken off the board or crippled".
The left-wing bias in Wikipedia content comes from the community, not the WMF. And it doesn't need a conspiracy - Wikipedia is leftish because most of the people with the time and inclination to edit a free online encyclopedia are leftish. To make a right-wing Wikipedia, you need a community of conservatives willing to make sure that they have high quality articles on things like History of Tamil Nadu and Runge-Kutta methods for solving differential equations.
Conservapedia was not an attempt to do this - it was basically a collaborative homework project for conservative homeschoolers. Vox Day's Infogalactic failed because he couldn't find right-wing editors willing to edit anything except a few pages on high-profile political topics.
The rows between the community and the WMF have been intra-left factional battles which the WMF successfully spun as them being even more SJW than the community. But they aren't - they're just more cynical about using bad-faith social justice messaging as a tool of power.
I think you may have misunderstood. If WMF dies, then the main ENWP site goes down and stays down. At that point, the policies and bureaucracy of current ENWP are meaningless; someone will build a successor, probably based on one of the mirrors, but they don't need to import those policies and that bureaucracy. This is how to beat network effects if you can't just straight-up steal the network (or brute-force through it); you destroy the functionality of the existing network so that people are available for a replacement.
It already leaned that way, but it got a lot worse during the first Trump Presidency and especially in 2020, as critical mass and enough (perceived) urgency was achieved to do an actual purge. This went up in 2018, and it's treated as policy despite officially not being so (IIRC I've seen it cited in a ban comment). The "lab-leak is misinformation" line from 2020, in particular, saw mass bannings of those who objected, which split mostly across tribal lines. "The
rebelsrightists have been routed; they're fleeing into the woods."Until that purge, it was organically fixable if one could recruit enough non-SJWs to the cause. Now, it's not, because the admins would just ban them all once it became obvious that they were such. The bureaucracy implementing the ongoing purge has to be removed or supplanted first.
I used to actually edit Wikipedia on a semi-regular basis; this is what I noticed while there (and why I left).
And Jimbo puts it back up again under a new domain name, and both the editor community and (more slowly, unless Google intervenes) the readers (and SME editors, who are mostly ascended readers) find it there. The content of the existing encyclopedia, and the MediaWiki software are open-source and widely mirrored.
The policies and bureaucracy of ENWP are meaningful to the extend that they reflect the shared values of the editor community. IAR is an explicit commitment that the shared values of the community will trump the policies and bureaucracy. The shared values of the community survive a migration to a different domain.
People have done. The one I am most familiar with is Vox Day's InfoGalactic. It failed. You either need to import the existing editor community (which gets you the shared values that guarantee that return of the policies and bureaucracy) or build a new editor community.
It's the people who made Wikipedia leftish. That particular group of people are not available to a conservative Wikipedia-replacement.
The normal way you beat a network effect is by providing an alternative that is sufficiently compelling to a subset of high-value users that they jump first and bring the rest of the network with them later. Facebook beat Myspace by offering a much better product to students and recent graduates of prestigious universities first, and then attracting people who wanted to be friends with elite graduates. Twitter took a bunch of mindshare off Facebook by offering a much better product to the bluecheck class, and then attracting people who wanted to follow them and reply to them. Apple held the line against Microsoft by offering a much better product to creative professionals and the developers who develop software for them (mostly Adobe). If Bitcoin defeats Swift as a payments network, it will do it by offering a much better product to criminals like Ross Ulbricht and his customers, and then over time attracting people who want to trade with criminals.
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