[Foundation-l] Knol, a year later

[Anthony]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 1:57 PM, Mike Godwin <mnemonic at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.)


Huh?  Whack-a-mole?  I imported Wikipedia content into Knol, under the GFDL,
and never was even asked to take it down.

The problem isn't the licensing.  The problem is duplicate content.  Unless
*maybe* if you're one of the top experts in the world for the topic, people
don't want to read your 95% Wikipedia and 5% original contribution.  Even if
you are one of the top experts in the world for the topic, you're better off
presenting your 5% contribution as a standalone article, criticizing the
Wikipedia article and referencing Wikipedia by link.

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.


Better internal linking is the most needed adjustment/redesign.  An
"encyclopedia that anyone can add an article to", with maybe an allowance
for minor edit suggestions and collaborations of small well-knit teams, is
an interesting twist that could help provide useful information that
Wikipedia doesn't and in fact can't provide.

Anthony