On 16/12/2007, Omegatron 9ybf94w02@sneakemail.com wrote:
On Dec 14, 2007 3:22 AM, David Gerard dgerard-at-......... |Wikipedia mailing lists (wikitech-l, wikien-l)| <... > wrote:
It's not free content, so that immediately makes it less useful or interesting in our terms.
But that has no bearing on whether it will be a competitor. The regular people reading our articles and linking us to the top search results don't know and don't care about licensing. To them, the "free" in the tagline means "no credit card required". Wikipedia is at the top because of its neutrality and comprehensiveness (and maybe indirectly because of its license; if only because of links from the multitude of mirrors our license spawns).
Their aim is to be a competitor in page hits. Page hits aren't our primary goal. (I just started a thread on foundation-l about the benefits and problems of popularity.) More freely-reusable content is our goal, and if we can encourage Google to turn their massive resources to that then it's excellent for everyone. And quality articles written by experts on Knol will be useful as good references for Wikipedia articles!
- d.