Andrew Whitworth wrote:
+our goal is to spread this knowledge freely to all humanity. People knowing of our existence is a prerequisite to them using our knowledge.
I agree that's currently the case, but it need not be forever. Right now the main reason that knowledge-spreading would be reduced by *.wiki[m|p]edia.org getting fewer hits is that we're both the content producers and the only significant distributors of the content. If there were lots of third-party reuse and distribution of our content (as intended by our Free license!) then our own popularity would be less important, and we could focus more on producing good content, knowing that as soon as we put it out there, other organizations would step in to distribute it to whatever corners of the earth could benefit from it.
In many ways that'd be better IMO, as central "push" distribution is harder to tailor to end-users' needs than "pull" distribution where hundreds of organizations around the world reuse our content. One of the points of free content is that it's hard to predict exactly how someone might want to use something, so best to put it under a license that allows anyone to adapt the work as needed.
But so far that seems to be getting started fairly slowly, especially as regards other nonprofit organizations doing something interesting with our content. Why this is I'm not entirely sure. Is it that nobody has good ideas? Or they find the format we provide our dumps in too intimidating? Or they want more filtered/stable content? Or they lack money? Etc.
-Mark