[Foundation-l] Knol, a year later

[Samuel Klein]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 2:08 PM, David Gerard<dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/8/10 Mike Godwin <mnemonic at gmail.com>:
>
>> the primary problem for Knol
>> was lack of compatibility with the existing dominant free licenses used by
>> Wikimedia projects and others.  In short, it was difficult for Knol to build
>> on the work of other collaborative freely licensed projects without, as a
>> practical matter, violating those licenses...
><
>> ... to me the takeaway from this error of Knol's licensing design is not
>> that Knol can't work -- it's that it actually could work, if properly
>> thought through.
>
> 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.

I was about to write a similar reply.  One of the great joys of our
work is that when more people join in, whether or not they are doing
it through a 'central' site, they are supporting the mission of the
projects.  Having a hundred groups or services supporting free
knowledge collaboration is better than having just a few; and it
benefits us to help projects such as Knol pick the right licenses --
ones that let them cooperate smoothly with Wikipedia -- and foster a
sense of vital collaboration that we all would like to see become the
norm in Internet services, not a Wikipedia specialty.

Greg writes:
> 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.

I think the parts of our mission that few other projects have adopted
or recognized are the commitment to completely open participation,
free licensing, and community ownership of (oversight, style guides,
&c).  Each of these three elements dramatically changes the cost of
maintenance, the flexibility and scalability of responses to new
ideas, the distribution of knowledge through secondary channels, and
the persistence of systemic bias.

The best way to minimize the risk of these elements being lost in the
future is to  make them more universal in our society, and not allow
these ideas to be bound too tightly to Wikipedia alone.  Making
Wiktionary, Wikibooks and sister projects more successful is one way
to achieve this; encouraging other global knowledge projects to adopt
these principles is another.

SJ