No subject

wrong.  [From the perspective of running a small business, they may be
doing just fine.]

Effective access to collaborative knowledge is important to a
harmonious society.  As a result, basic knowledge-sharing tools and
toolchains should be free, for any sort of use, customization, and
improvement.  The universal value of a Q&A system is directly tied to
the importance that good free tools should be available to set one up.

We want to support these free toolchains, which is why we release all
of our own code, and also why, when there are good free versions of
proprietary tools, we should support them and help them grow.  That
support is one of the ways we contribute to the greater movement, and
has a lasting value to other knowledge projects around the world.

> There's no need to re-invent the wheel.

Noone has suggested building our own Q&A tool, but rather choosing one
of the available free-software tools.

Whether we host that ourselves or not is a separate question.  Both
OSQA and Question2Answer offer hosted services.
(However we don't want one of our services vulnerable to being shut
down by an unfriendly host, so any solution we use must be one that we
could choose to host ourselves, if necessary.)

Thomas writes:

> the main advantage is that your putting it under a name and community
> who are already experienced at doing really good QA - so your seed of
> volunteers is going to be that much better! You will get SE veterans who =
are
> also Wiki editors that will be much more inclined to contribute, for
> example. With a site such as this, kudos and points means everything -
> because answering questions (especially the horribly mundane ones..) is
> tedious and boring work. And SE have nailed that vibe.

I agree that they have nailed that vibe.  Quora have tapped into it as well=
.
It is a valuable vibe :-)  and also one deeply rooted in human nature,
like wiki editing.

For precisely the reasons you mention, it is important for us to have
a better in-house QA tool.  We need a better channel for the people
who are in that zone to shine on Wikipedia -- beyond simply manning
the Reference Desk and similar pages in various languages (which many
hundreds of them already do).

We have some pretty stellar community groups to seed such a site with
ourselves -- and this will offer a place for many more who are
nonplussed by wiki editing to get involved and stay involved.

SJ