Juergen Fenn, 08/12/19 01:22: Indeed, although this has changed a bit after she won a Nobel. It was 2007 when "Understanding knowledge as a commons" made the link clear between that theory and Wikipedia. It's nothing unusual though: even "Free as in freedom" 1.0[1] will tell you that such books were published during a peak of interest, arguably *after* the ideas they were describing had succeeded (like GNU/Linux in the 1990s), yet the same ideas were present as underground current if not direct inspiration[2] for those same successes before. The same with Wikipedia: most "classics" were probably published in the late 2000s after its success,[3] and even Lessig's "Free culture", in 2004, was already able to mention Wikipedia as a success (although most of the book is on music!). The early Wikimedia projects users did not come thanks to them and may have absorbed the ideas in other ways. As for the late users and the mass of infrequent contributors, it's hard to tell how influenced they were. Same for other classics on copyleft, the internet etc. like David L. Lange, James Boyle and others not mentioned yet. It might be that such classics are actually written when they are in a way superfluous and we come back to them when we lost our way. (I personally read most of them during some crisis even though I knew their contents and may have referenced them in public presentations before that, ouch.) A survey to find out what "cultural references" the wikimedians have would be interesting: I agree we'd have some surprises (in Italy, R. David Lankes is mentioned a lot in some circles due to the influence of librarians). It would be interesting to know which classics or other works are most effective at convincing the public about the underlying principles of the Wikimedia projects, or even at recruiting new active users. In Italy we've just started experimenting a bit on this, with a free distribution to schools of a few thousand copies of Carlo Piana (2018) <https://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Open_source,_software_libero_e_altre_libert%C3%A0>. Federico [1] <https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/>, updated version <https://www.fsf.org/faif/>. [2] Nupedia was directly inspired by GNU <https://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/free-encyclopedia.html>, a fact which is standard to mention at least in classic Wikimedia Italia public outreach since the 2005. [3] Consider also Aigrain, Boldrin/Levine, De Martin/De Rosnay <http://www.copyleft-italia.it/libri/libri-autori-stranieri.html> and many others in languages other than English and Italian that I probably know nothing about.

Even aside from their fall from grace, I guess, one would read "Cathedral and the Bazaar" as historically influential text today, I am not sure how "strong" it is as analysis of commons based systems in the first place. Jan Am So., 8. Dez. 2019 um 02:27 Uhr schrieb Stuart A. Yeates < syeates(a)gmail.com&gt;gt;: -- Jan Dittrich UX Design/ Research Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin Tel. (030) 219 158 26-0 https://wikimedia.de Unsere Vision ist eine Welt, in der alle Menschen am Wissen der Menschheit teilhaben, es nutzen und mehren können. Helfen Sie uns dabei! https://spenden.wikimedia.de Wikimedia Deutschland — Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.