Juergen Fenn, 08/12/19 01:22:
Commoners used to draw on Wikipedia as an outstanding example of commons
goods, but Wikipedians usually do not refer to Ostrom's works
Indeed, although this has changed a bit after she won a Nobel. It was
2007 when "Understanding knowledge as a commons" made the link clear
between that theory and Wikipedia.
It's nothing unusual though: even "Free as in freedom" 1.0[1] will tell
you that such books were published during a peak of interest, arguably
*after* the ideas they were describing had succeeded (like GNU/Linux in
the 1990s), yet the same ideas were present as underground current if
not direct inspiration[2] for those same successes before.
The same with Wikipedia: most "classics" were probably published in the
late 2000s after its success,[3] and even Lessig's "Free culture", in
2004, was already able to mention Wikipedia as a success (although most
of the book is on music!). The early Wikimedia projects users did not
come thanks to them and may have absorbed the ideas in other ways. As
for the late users and the mass of infrequent contributors, it's hard to
tell how influenced they were. Same for other classics on copyleft, the
internet etc. like David L. Lange, James Boyle and others not mentioned yet.
It might be that such classics are actually written when they are in a
way superfluous and we come back to them when we lost our way. (I
personally read most of them during some crisis even though I knew their
contents and may have referenced them in public presentations before
that, ouch.) A survey to find out what "cultural references" the
wikimedians have would be interesting: I agree we'd have some surprises
(in Italy, R. David Lankes is mentioned a lot in some circles due to the
influence of librarians).
It would be interesting to know which classics or other works are most
effective at convincing the public about the underlying principles of
the Wikimedia projects, or even at recruiting new active users. In Italy
we've just started experimenting a bit on this, with a free distribution
to schools of a few thousand copies of Carlo Piana (2018)
<https://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Open_source,_software_libero_e_altre_libert%C3%A0>.
Federico
[1] <https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/>, updated version
<https://www.fsf.org/faif/>.
[2] Nupedia was directly inspired by GNU
<https://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/free-encyclopedia.html>, a fact which
is standard to mention at least in classic Wikimedia Italia public
outreach since the 2005.
[3] Consider also Aigrain, Boldrin/Levine, De Martin/De Rosnay
<http://www.copyleft-italia.it/libri/libri-autori-stranieri.html> and
many others in languages other than English and Italian that I probably
know nothing about.
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