As perhaps some people here will recall, I was always skeptical of Knol's ability to enter the collaborative knowledge space. The reasons discussed here, including SJ's mentions of the issues of structuring public collaboration, are no doubt valid, but to me -- and of course it may be said that this is my Lawyer Vision(tm) kicking in -- 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. (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.)
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. We're going to have to continue to give serious attention to all the issues, from quality to community to legality, that give us an advantage in terms of fueling creative collaboration, as we go forward. The next Knol can't be relied upon to make the same mistakes. --Mike _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
