[Foundation-l] Long-term archiving of Wikimedia content

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/5/5 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
>> It clearly has value (otherwise there would be no such thing as
>> academia), but I don't think it has a well defined monetary value.
>
>
> How not?  There's a certain price you'd be willing to pay for education,
> isn't there?  It doesn't have an *intrinsic* monetary value, if that's what
> you mean, but I'd argue that nothing has *intrinsic* value of any sort.
> Value means value to a particular person.

I explicitly said I was talking about the existence of knowledge, not
access to knowledge. Education is about access to knowledge. Education
has value because of scarcity - someone with a degree can earn more
than someone without a degree because there are fewer people that can
do the jobs they can do. We're not talking about whether it is
valuable to an individual for them to have certain knowledge (that's a
pretty easy question to answer - it's clear "yes"), but whether it is
valuable to society (whatever that means) for that knowledge to exist
(that's rather more difficult - I doubt you could reasonable argue
"no", but it is debatable whether the question is well posed).