[Foundation-l] Knol, a year later

[Peter Gervai]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 21:02, Samuel Klein<meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's hard to replace an open collaborative process,

On the contrary. I believe most of us cannot concentrate working power
("human resources") to, say, 5 full-fledged knowledge recording
community. Most people tend to have a favourite project to aim
attention at, and others get less and less time.

If there was 3 equally successful projects mimicking Wikipedia it's
very well possible that a significant amount of contributors would
pick one project with 1/5th of the contributors (which would [or may]
result inferior content due to lower community review) while others
may lose interest altogether since they wouldn't be adventurous enough
to re-learn the stupid habits of yet another community, or wouldn't
want to contribute to a project fractional in size.

This is not a linear, logical, easy to describe process. People cannot
be moved or reassigned between communities, and by dividing them each
project may get less than the proportional amount of contributors
joined. Or more, if they'd be successful in specialisation and gather
a better functioning community (which is not hard in the case of WP
communities, mind you).

As well as WP's current success this process is a mistery for future
tellers. I'm not sure more wikipedia-like projects would be better,
nor that it'd be worse. I guess time have the habit of coming up with
new contestants all the time, and one is bound to succeed. All I want
is that it should be a free content open project.

The name doesn't really matter. Wikipedia or else.

Because knowledge wants to be free, after all.

grin