[Foundation-l] Knol, a year later

[Samuel Klein]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 3:57 PM, Mike Godwin<mnemonic at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 12:02 PM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> An interesting concept.  It's hard to replace an open collaborative
>> process, but I think this is a subject worthy of a planning workshop
>
> This of course is why open democracies are never superseded by more

Can you name some free knowledge or free software collaborations that
have been replaced by something less open or collaborative?  I'd still
like to see a longer discussion or workshop on the subject.

> The human resources it takes to build, maintain, preserve, and expand
> information are rivalrous. But don't take my word for it -- ask economists.
<
>> How could we lose the content we have helped create?
>
> Bruce Sterling identifies many ways in which this can happen, perhaps most
> notably in the Dead Media Project.  Civilizations lose information all the
> time if it's not actively maintained.

Even deadmedia.org seems to be dead (ouch).  I feel as though this
thread is starting to mix together
 - the risk of another site replacing Wikipedia for readers,
 - the risk of the contributing community finding a project that
better suits their interests in collaboration and sharing knowledge;
 - the risk of Wikimedia projects losing some of their current ideals
 - the risk of current Wikimedia material being ignored by future
reference works

The last two could happen even if no other project tries to tackle the
same problem.


>> We can invest effort as a community in 'eternal vigilance', uniting
>> against a common foe,
>
> This "common foe" thing is something you've made up out of whole cloth. Not
> one word I've written has posited or imagined a "common foe".  Perhaps you
> have confused my writings with someone else's?

I understood you to suggest eternal vigilance was needed to maintain a
sort of market dominance, though I'm not certain of the market you
have in mind.  The foe would be projects that don't satisfy (enough
of) wikimedia's ideals and threaten to siphon off contributors.

>> and fending off memetic predators
>
> Memetic predators? What? Where is this coming from?

See above.  If such a less-idealistic project tries to capture the
interest of people who currently love and contribute to Wikipedia, it
is preying on those who have currently taken to the wiki and
open-collaboration memes (presumably replacing them with other memes
that are less free, or less scalable).

The meme of free sharing of tools and knowledge as a stepping stone to
accomplishing amazingly great things, such as making the Internet not
suck, is a powerful one.  But you're right that we need to work to
keep it from being distorted over time.

SJ