Pros and cons

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Permalink Reply by Knolstuff on December 16, 2007 at 10:54pm

Wikipedia is fantastic! Who are we kidding, what an incredible endeavor it was and is. If Google can provide a different angle, then great, and it will be wildly successful. But Wikipedia should be proud of what it has accomplished. Now remember Paul, KnolStuff.com is just a social Community for Google's Knol project, not the actual site itself. That hasn't launched yet. You may know that already, I just want to make sure.

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Permalink Reply by Alex Roshuk on December 16, 2007 at 11:14pm

I was (and probably still am) a Wikipedia administrator (one out of 1000, approximately). I stopped editing about a year ago for several reasons. Perhaps most importantly (but not the only reason) was my frustration with the interpretation of the GFDL "open source" license. Very often when you wrote contributions they would "disappear" from the current version of an article. I felt this was not in the spirit of the GFDL because it was being applied to "joint copyright" ownership and if your contribution had been "voted" out of existence by other "volunteer editors" this meant that the GFDL license was terminated for that contributor, because, basically the other co-author's terminated that contribution from the Wikipedia that was "published". I got into a dispute with Brian Vibber about this (he was one of the chief developers of Wikipedia's software, MediaWiki) and Jimbo Wales thought I was crazy when I brought this up as a pressing legal issue. When Jimbo went to Harvard University he would not ask the students there about this issue even though I told him I thought it would become a major issue in the future, and indeed it has become one of the issues of the so-called "Wikipedia Wars" of the last few months. Jimbo never understood (or wanted to listen) to what I was talking about. Basically I interpret the GFDL to be part of an implied agreement when applied to a wiki collaborative editing project and if some of the editors go against the spirit of the collaboration I don't think that their contributions hold. There is also a reason for this relating to copyright infringements that are rampant in Wikipedia's page histories. My interpretation of the wikification of the GFDL deals with terminating these infringements as "joint contributions". Vibber (who is not a lawyer like me but a developer) felt that once you released something under the GFDL anyone could use it for any reason but this does not follow the basic principle that you can never grant more of a right that you own in a work and if there are strings attached then these strings (even if not written in the license) are part of the license and can possibly terminate it.

Now it seems that the "deletionists" have taken over Wikipedia and based on what they believe are the issues of "quality control" they remove valid contributions from Wikipedia projects. In the early days we tried to always incorporate previous submissions into an article, not edit them (or even the article) out of existence. I also think that there has always been a problem with the "anonymous" contributor to Wikipedia, not because I do not believe in pseudonyms (the US copyright law specifically authorizes it) but because it is virtually impossible to check what we in the IP legal business (Disclosure: I worked as a volunteer lawyer for Wikimedia Foundation Inc. and Wikipedia from 2003 to 2005) call "the chain of title". Because of this Wikipedia content is virtually useless except on the internet, so even though the idea was to make it available "commercially" through the GFDL open source license, one would have to really do a lot of due diligence before one published an Wikipedia text outside the internet and if one had not contributed to that article on Wikipedia one runs the risk of having the joint editors/authors seek an injunction against someone who publishes Wikipedia content.

All issues related to Larry Sanger and Citizendium aside, I really think that Google has decided that the several years it boosted WP page rank and gave WMF enough of an audience to help it generate a sizeable budget (remember that Wikimedia is a NPO, charitable organization. Now Google knows how not to run such a collaborative project and Knol is its attempt at an answer.

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Permalink Reply by Tony Kim on December 17, 2007 at 8:07pm

Well, I have to say whatever knol will turn out to be, I'd welcome any addition to Wikipedia. Wikipedia has it's own strength. But it has major flaws which it cannot recover from due to it's main design. As a former(current) administrator, you should be aware of some of the controverial entries. Controversy is especially heated among religious and medical entries. The process of changing information is very frustrating especially when administrator has no knowledge of the issue at hand and/or when all sides of parties are passionate due to loyalty or finantial motivation.

Also, it isn't uncommon to find links that are placed for marketing purpose on wikipedia. So ad-free claim really isn't accurate either.

I feel Knol is going to be a refreshing change. At least, authors will have to face the music if their information is out of line and will have to be accountable for. And they will be experts in the area and if there's new information available, they should be able to weigh it accordingly when considering inclusion of the new information.

I can't wait for Knol to be introduced.

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