On Dec 17, 2007 4:01 AM, Florence Devouard Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Dear community,
I do not share the same optimism than Jimbo with regards to Knol. I think Knol is probably our biggest threat since the creation of Wikipedia. I really mean the biggest. Maybe not so much the project itself, but the competition it will create, the PR consequences, the financial tsunami, the confusion in people minds (free as in free speech or as in free of charge).
Hi Anthere,
as some of you know, I am quite focussed on monitoring media items about wikipedia. Out of 150 news items in Germany about Google Knol, not a single one of them did *not* mention Wikipedia. This is a media perception thing, since some of the journalists do not know about the existence of encyclopedias beside wikipedia any more...
While I agree that Google Knol's effect will be larger than just the project itself, I do not see a threat in it - unless one starts to think that Wikipedia has some kind of monopoly on Knowledge or encyclopedic texts. The consequences you mentioned have always been there, when britannica made their free-of-charge-trial, when some *pedia-spinoffs decided to use a non-free license, when mirrors introduced advertisements, when WMF for some reason decided to leave the impression that it is now paying illustrators.... A project does not turn from rotten to golden just because you put "Google" in front of it and there are far to few facts out there to give a justified opinion whether it will fail or succeed (by any metric).
My advise is to wait until the project has actually surfaced, to analyse it (maybe also to play with it) and to look carefully which parts might be adaptable. And not to consider it a threat, neither in public statements nor in thinking.
Mathias