On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 1:57 PM, Mike Godwin <[email protected]> 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 _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
