On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 2:08 PM, David Gerard<[email protected]> wrote: > 2009/8/10 Mike Godwin <[email protected]>: > >> the primary problem for Knol >> was lack of compatibility with the existing dominant free licenses used by >> Wikimedia projects and others. 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... >< >> ... 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. > > 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.
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. Greg writes: > The risk is that something will come about which doesn't share the > bulk of our mission (i.e. isn't free content) but which is a > sufficient replacement for the bulk of the readership. I think the parts of our mission that few other projects have adopted or recognized are the commitment to completely open participation, free licensing, and community ownership of (oversight, style guides, &c). Each of these three elements dramatically changes the cost of maintenance, the flexibility and scalability of responses to new ideas, the distribution of knowledge through secondary channels, and the persistence of systemic bias. 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. SJ _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
