joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
Quoting Nathan Awrich nawrich@gmail.com:
I wouldn't rely on the head start, since Wikipedia content is free for re-use. Anything we've got here thats good, they can copy and improve. However, that is based on a view of these enterprises as competitive. Really, they are complementary. The point, in this case, is the goal rather than the path. Wikipedia is useful _now_, but in the future it may be any one of similar projects. We could be Lycos or Infoseek foreshadowing Google. Works for me.
Well Citizendium for reasons I don't fully understand decided to delete all of their from-Wikipedia content that hadn't been already highly modified. So they seem to be determined to succeed without the free re-use which seems to me at least to be needlessly shooting oneself in the foot. I want my content to be reused. I'd likely not contribute if it had to be under a more restrictive license. But yes, if the best we do is to make a roadmap for someone to do even better than we have done we should be happy.
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I think that's an important point. The idea here is, knowledge should be shared. If answers.com can help share that knowledge, more power to them (whether they make a buck or not). If Citizendium, or Knol, or anyone else can do that, great for them. Our license ensures that they can do that. It also, however, ensures that others can continue to do that-no one can lock up the content later.
If someone finds a better way of developing and sharing a free knowledge base then we so far have, more power to them.