[Foundation-l] Knol, a year later

[Samuel Klein]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 2:38 PM, Mike Godwin<mnemonic at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 11:08 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

An interesting concept.  It's hard to replace an open collaborative
process, but I think this is a subject worthy of a planning workshop
at Wikimania.  The advantage of being open and minimal-overhead is
that we can discuss great improvements publicly, and implement them.


> 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?

The current active community is largely here for reasons of belief in
our core mission.   There are so many important and interesting
projects that we don't have time as a community to address -- if some
new group comes along and starts addressing one of them under a
compatible license, I don't see our current contributors somehow being
too inflexible to redirect their efforts.  (and it seems likely that
over time we would learn from the new creators, find out what feedback
and engagement they liked from the new system that WP (for instance)
didn't provide, and help them improve and expand our current
community)

> 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

>From an evolutionary standpoint, mixing with other cultures and
contributing to them without trying to encapsulate them is an
effective way to propagate ideas and memes.

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

I understand that your original comment was about preservation.    I
don't think that Gresham's Law applies in the realm of non-rival
knowledge and services.  It might in the realm of 'public attention'
-- though today it is common for people to take in duplicate free
information.

> 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... active spread of the
collaborative culture we
> believe in requires something like eternal vigilance.

How could we lose the content we have helped create?  I agree that we
could do more to present the principles that support Wikipedia to our
readers.  The idea of public sharing and a collective commons are just
as popular as WP itself, but need reinforcement.

> 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.

Neither do emails keep million-person collaborations from becoming
irrelevant, yet they are part of the process.

We can invest effort as a community in 'eternal vigilance', uniting
against a common foe, and fending off memetic predators -- or we can
invest effort in spreading ideas and sharing best practices in the
spirit of empowering others to learn from our discoveries.  There is
an opportunity cost either way.

Sj