> On 20 December 2010 19:47, Noein <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Is there a general consensus about achieving a monopoly as a good goal. >> Â Is this part of some public strategy? Is this the position of WMF? Of >> chapters? >> I thought I heard some weeks ago on that mail list that diversity is >> good. That competitors are healthy. Could we have a clarification of >> positions about this? > > > I can't speak for anyone but myself - but I think, and I've seen many > others who express an opinion think, that competition would be good > and monopoly as *the* encyclopedia is not intrinsically a good thing. > > The big win would be to make proper free content licenses - preferably > public domain, CC-by, CC-by-sa, as they're the most common - the > *normal* way to distribute educational and academic materials. Because > that would fulfill the Foundation mission statement - > > "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in > the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment." > > - without us having to do every bit of it. And really, that mission > statement cannot be attained unless we make free content *normal and > expected*, and everyone else joins in. > > Furthermore, being *the* encyclopedia is mostly a headache for us. > Wikipedia wasn't started with the aim of running a hugely popular > website, whose popularity has gone beyond merely "famous", beyond > merely "mainstream", to being part of the assumed background. We're an > institution now - part of the scenery. This has made every day for the > last eight years a very special "wtf" moment technically. It means we > can't run an encyclopedia out of Jimbo's spare change any more and > need to run fundraisers, to remind the world that this institution is > actually a rather small-to-medium-sized charity. > > (I think reaching this state was predictable. I said a few years ago > that in ten years, the only encyclopedia would be Wikipedia or > something directly derived from Wikipedia. I think this is the case, > and I don't think it's necessarily a good thing.) > > So I'd say, no - monopoly isn't a goal for us, it's something that's > happened. We need to encourage everyone else to take on the goal of > our mission with their own educational, scientific, academic etc > materials. We can't change the world all on our own. > > The next question is what to do about this. Deliberately crippling > Wikipedia would be silly, of course. But encouraging the propagation > of proper free content licences - which is somewhat more restrictive > than what our most excellent friends at Creative Commons do, though > they're an ideal organisation to work with on it - directly helps our > mission, for example. > > As I said, I can't speak for anyone else, but if anyone here disagrees > I'm open to correction on any of the above. > > > - d.
The network effects are massive. Simply wanting doing something better doesn't work. What does work is Wikia wikis such as Lostpedia that will draw a small crowd. Fred User:Fred Bauder _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
