[Foundation-l] Knol, a year later

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 2:08 PM, David Gerard<dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Whuh?
>
> Educational free content production is not competition with us. It's
> success for us.

Which isn't exactly what Knol is... and probably won't be what
next-knol will be.

Of course, knol never really was something likely to compete with Wikipedia.

> Knol, as first put forward, looked like about.com - factual signed
> articles. If it had worked, that would have been fantastic as a
> reference source.
>
> In what way would a successful version of Knol actually be a problem
> for us? If ten other websites fulfill WMF's mission without WMF having
> to pay the hosting bills, how is that a problem for us? I really don't
> see it.


The risk is that something will come about which doesn't share the
bulk of our mission (i.e. isn't free content) but which is a
sufficient replacement for the bulk of the readership.

Wikipedia could be replaced by something which was greatly inferior
based on many metrics which we, collectively, consider important but
which was superior in other ways (better marketed; less likely to
randomly display penises on inappropriate articles; etc).

I think it's a real risk, and that risk is why we have to be diligent
at also being good a marketing, creating things like stable versions
and basically trying to come up with every way of being great that we
can which doesn't conflict with the core mission.