[Foundation-l] Knol, a year later

[Mike Godwin]

As perhaps some people here will recall, I was always skeptical of Knol's
ability to enter the collaborative knowledge space.  The reasons discussed
here, including SJ's mentions of the issues of structuring public
collaboration, are no doubt valid, but to me -- and of course it may be said
that this is my Lawyer Vision(tm) kicking in -- the primary problem for Knol
was lack of compatibility with the existing dominant free licenses used by
Wikimedia projects and others.  In short, it was difficult for Knol to build
on the work of other collaborative freely licensed projects without, as a
practical matter, violating those licenses. (We saw countless examples of
people attempting to import Wikipedia content into Knol, for example, and
played a bit of whack-a-mole with those folks.)

But to me the takeaway from this error of Knol's licensing design is not
that Knol can't work -- it's that it actually could work, if properly
thought through.  So my view right now is the Wikimedia community can't be
complacent about Knol's apparent failure -- properly adjusted and
redesigned, it could have quite an impact on us.  We're going to have to
continue to give serious attention to all the issues, from quality to
community to legality, that give us an advantage in terms of fueling
creative collaboration, as we go forward.

The next Knol can't be relied upon to make the same mistakes.


--Mike