[Foundation-l] Knol, a year later

[David Goodman]

The number of people available is not limited to the current number.
There are many potential contributors to an encyclopedia who for one
reason or another are unwilling to work at Wikipedia. There are many
more who would be attracted by the competition.

David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG



On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 3:41 PM, Peter Gervai<grinapo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
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