[Foundation-l] Advertisements?

[Robert Rohde]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 2:47 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 20/03/2008, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >  However, a fork, particularly a commercially financed one, that seeks
> to go
> >  beyond being a mere copy by providing a differentiated feature set and
> >  seeking to build its own community could be an entirely different beast
> from
> >  any of the forks we have now seen.  And in my personal opinion, an
> >  especially dangerous one at that.
>
>
> Not necessarily. What we need is to make not only forking possible,
> but to make re-merging feasible, complete with GFDL credit trail. Then
> there's a lot less to fear from forks.
>

GFDL is only part of it.  You realize that a fork would be under no
obligation to provide any convenient handles for bulk export, right?  Also,
it's a quirk of the GPL, but as long as they don't distribute the software
outside their company, such a company would also be under no obligation to
open source any extensions or derivatives they might write for Mediawiki.
Hence if they do differentiate themselves on the basis of software features
it would require significant effort to duplicate.

In addition, they could adopt different policies (e.g. Scientific POV) or
community structures that would support an independent community even in the
face of merging and cross-polination.

Right now Wikipedia has what is pretty close to a monopoly on the
collaboratively written internet encyclopedia market.  Conservapedia and
Citizendium, etc. are technically competitors, but their effective market
share is neglible, and they both have joined us in an ad-free donor-driven
business model.

During the next 3-10 years I expect to see Wikipedia's monopoly on
collaboratively written internet encyclopedias to be significantly eroded by
serious competitors.  In my opinion, a commercial fork is a likely avenue
for such competition (though not the only one).  How well we withstand that
competition is likely to depend on the capability and flexibility of the WMF
team being assembled now.  I'd like to see the WMF as the dominant player in
collaborative knowledge creation and sharing going into the indefinite
future, but given that the WMF has no ownership of content, I would say that
this is far from a sure thing.  I don't think that Wikipedia would ever be
wiped out by competitors, but it isn't that hard for me to imagine scenarios
in which Wikipedia loses the bulk of the traffic and importance it has
today.

-Robert Rohde