[Foundation-l] Knol, a year later

[Mike Godwin]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 11:37 AM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:


> I was about to write a similar reply.  One of the great joys of our
> work is that when more people join in, whether or not they are doing
> it through a 'central' site, they are supporting the mission of the
> projects.  Having a hundred groups or services supporting free
> knowledge collaboration is better than having just a few; and it
> benefits us to help projects such as Knol pick the right licenses --
> ones that let them cooperate smoothly with Wikipedia -- and foster a
> sense of vital collaboration that we all would like to see become the
> norm in Internet services, not a Wikipedia specialty.


Please understand me when I say I think it would have been great if Knol had
(among other things) picked the right licenses.  My actual words should not
be read as saying that the collaborative effort represented by Wikipedia
(and other projects) should be confined to Wikimedia projects alone.  A more
nuanced reading, I think, would recognize that I was trying to underscore
the possibility that a project only 60 percent as good at fulfilling our
mission could still replace us or make us irrelevant -- losing the values
and culture and even much of the content we have helped create.  Any study
of the history of economics sees patterns like this all the time. I am
suggesting we need not be passive victims of such a pattern, and that active
spread of the collaborative culture we believe in requires something like
eternal vigilance.  In this respect, my views are as intense as, say, rms's.

The best way to minimize the risk of these elements being lost in the
> future is to  make them more universal in our society, and not allow
> these ideas to be bound too tightly to Wikipedia alone.  Making
> Wiktionary, Wikibooks and sister projects more successful is one way
> to achieve this; encouraging other global knowledge projects to adopt
> these principles is another.


I want to gently suggest that while there are many ways to make these
elements more universal in our society, but moral suasion on mailing lists
is perhaps not the dominant tactic.



--Mike