[Foundation-l] Knol, a year later

[Mike Godwin]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 12:02 PM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:


> 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.


This of course is why open democracies are never superseded by more
restrictive governance. Because democracy is just naturally more successful,
see?


> > 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)
>

At first I couldn't see how you had missed the point here -- you seem to
assume the community has limitless human labor and resources, and I think
there is every reason to believe it does not, including recent statistical
data. But then I read your next comments and understood better:


> 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.
>

The human resources it takes to build, maintain, preserve, and expand
information are rivalrous. But don't take my word for it -- ask economists.

>
> How could we lose the content we have helped create?


Bruce Sterling identifies many ways in which this can happen, perhaps most
notably in the Dead Media Project.  Civilizations lose information all the
time if it's not actively maintained.


> We can invest effort as a community in 'eternal vigilance', uniting
> against a common foe,


This "common foe" thing is something you've made up out of whole cloth. Not
one word I've written has posited or imagined a "common foe".  Perhaps you
have confused my writings with someone else's?


> and fending off memetic predators


Memetic predators? What? Where is this coming from?


--Mike