[Foundation-l] Knol, a year later

[Milos Rancic]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 9:02 PM, Samuel Klein<meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
> The current active community is largely here for reasons of belief in
> our core mission.   There are so many important and interesting
> projects that we don't have time as a community to address -- if some
> new group comes along and starts addressing one of them under a
> compatible license, I don't see our current contributors somehow being
> too inflexible to redirect their efforts.  (and it seems likely that
> over time we would learn from the new creators, find out what feedback
> and engagement they liked from the new system that WP (for instance)
> didn't provide, and help them improve and expand our current
> community)

This is a good point. I am writing a project proposal on Strategy wiki
which should address this issue. Instead of [[meta:Proposals for new
projects]] we should actively work on this issue: some projects we
would be able to add into Wikimedia family, a lot of them we won't,
but we should promote some ideas to the wider community, so some other
groups can make them.

>> a project only 60 percent as good at fulfilling our mission could still replace us
>> or make us irrelevant -- losing the values and culture and even much of the
>> content we have helped create.  Any study of the history of economics sees
>> patterns like this all the time... active spread of the collaborative culture we
>> believe in requires something like eternal vigilance.
>
> How could we lose the content we have helped create?  I agree that we
> could do more to present the principles that support Wikipedia to our
> readers.  The idea of public sharing and a collective commons are just
> as popular as WP itself, but need reinforcement.

I agree with this Mike's point.

I believe that [knowledge-]sharing culture is strong enough. But, I
don't want to base my decisions on my beliefs, as well as I would be
very upset if I see that WMF is making decisions based on beliefs of
the Board and staff members.

As we don't know how stable our strength is, we should default our
decisions to resolute protection of our core goals. It is better to be
cautious and spend more efforts on something which don't need to be
necessary, than to gamble with faith in the better future.

It doesn't mean that we should be hostile toward other free knowledge
projects, of course. It does mean that we should actively lead
knowledge-sharing culture: to analyze actively what other projects
mean to our goals, to help those which have similar characteristics to
our projects, to point on problems of other projects. Wikimedia
community is becoming mature enough to take that responsibility.

(So, one more idea for the Strategy plan: Make a group which should
deal with other free knowledge projects. The goal of this group
shouldn't be dealing FSF or CC, but with wiki and other free knowledge
projects and communities.)