Mirror

A mirror is when one site hosts an identical (or near identical) copy of what was originally hosted on a different site. This act of 'mirroring' can happen for a variety of reasons: e.g. the content is hosted in a politically unstable location, and other sites will  the content in case the main site goes offline or becomes inaccessible. Mirroring is common amongst wikis, especially Wikipedia. Sometimes, a site will only host a portion of the original material, usually related to a specific concept or subject.

When the mirrored material is substantially changed and starts to take on a different life of its on, this is known as forking, and results in increasingly separate communities and resources.


 * See also
 * Federated wiki (concept).