[Foundation-l] Knol, a year later

[Mike Godwin]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 11:08 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Educational free content production is not competition with us. It's
> success for us.
>

Of course Knol is not in competition with us, and what I wrote should not be
worried about competition.  It should be understood as being worried about
being complacent with regard to our successes.

I can give you some models in which Knol, properly structured, could have
replaced us altogether.  In some sense that might be a victory for free
culture, but I see no particular reason to root for our being replaced just
yet.


> Knol, as first put forward, looked like about.com - factual signed
> articles. If it had worked, that would have been fantastic as a
> reference source.


And yet it didn't work.  The reasons it didn't work should inform our own
decisionmaking going forward.



> In what way would a successful version of Knol actually be a problem
> for us? If ten other websites fulfill WMF's mission without WMF having
> to pay the hosting bills, how is that a problem for us? I really don't
> see it.


The key would be whether the ten other websites fulfill WMF's mission,
right?  What if they fulfill 50 percent of WMF's mission but one of the
results of their success is that the Wikimedia community fades away?

There are other ways to analyze these issues besides economic competition
models, and I don't even think of economics primarily when I think of Knol
(as I had hoped my initial posting made clear).  Evolution and natural
selection are pretty merciless.  If there are things we value about
Wikimedian projects and culture, we have to give thought to how to preserve
and promote and evolve them in an environment that has other entities
playing similar (but not the same) roles.  Unless one hopes that the
ultimate goal of WMF simply is to fade away, and lose whatever made it
uniquely valuable.

Please go back and take a look at my posting about Knol and try to
understand it not as concern about competition, but concern about
preservation.

It's entirely possible for there to be a Gresham's Law with regard to
collaborative encyclopedias, in my view.


--Mike