On Dec 14, 2007 2:47 PM, Mathias Schindler mathias.schindler@gmail.com wrote:
On Dec 14, 2007 8:54 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 14/12/2007, Utkarshraj Atmaram utcursch@gmail.com wrote:
Sounds like about.com II, or Scholarpedia.
With the difference of Knol being licensed under CC-BY 3.0
The license is not the only difference -- in fact, I doubt that they'll force people to use CC-BY 3.0; the authors will probably have a choice.
The major difference is the word "Google".
One may ask: if I had to write on insomnia, I could create a page at Google Pages. How is Knol any different?
* The knol on insomnia will appear on the first page when you Google for "insomnia" * The knol is written by a Stanford University faculty member (which means the schools might accept such a knol as a reference for term papers). * The author gets paid for writing the knol
As Udi Manber mentions, Knol is meant to be "the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read." Remember what we tell people when they question reliability and accuracy of our articles? "Wikipedia is a starting point for research". That's what Knol is meant to be. If successful, it might rob Wikipedia of Google juice.
Moreover, Knol will have a focus on authorship. From the blog, "The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors [...] We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content." In all probability, Manber was trying to highlight the difference between Wikipedia and knol. Google will hope that the best Knol articles will come from expert academics (the screenshot shows an article written by Rachel Manber of Stanford University).
In most cases, the structure and content outline of a great Wikipedia article are decided by a single user or a very small group of users -- the others just fill in the gaps, correct typos, wikify the article, or crib about the article being biased. The Knol users will be "able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on". By, "submit edits and additional content", they probably mean that an article can be written by a group of users, which is what happens at Wikipedia. And of course, the users can submit feedback in forms of comments and question, which will lead to a better, revised article (see the "revisions" tab in the screenshot).
The temptation of getting paid and getting recognition through sole authorship might attract best contributors to Knol. At Knol, they won't have to bother about protecting their articles against trolls, cranks, vandals, and consensus of anonymous users.
Also, Knol can be updated frequently, just like Wikipedia. Errors can be pointed out and corrected in a short time, just like Wikipedia. And when Google "opens" it up, it can grow very fast, just like Wikipedia.
One might argue that Knol won't have unbiased articles on controversial topics like "Palestine" or "Kashmir", since the articles will be controlled by a single authors (or a set of authors). But then, the Wikipedia articles on such topics are hardly ever considered unbiased by everybody. Most of such articles are often tagged with {{pov}} or other ugly tags. A pro-Sri Lanka person will always crib about the existence of the article "Allegations of state terrorism in Sri Lanka", and an LTTE supporter will always complain about the article not being renamed to "State terrorism in Sri Lanka". Such articles on Wikipedia are mostly an "argument nexus" http://www.wired.com/software/webservices/commentary/alttext/2006/04/70670 -- Knol will users to create an argument nexus by allowing writing reviews on articles, rating the articles, and posting comments on why the article is good or bad.
Just like we highlight our best articles on the front page, Google will try their best to make sure that the best articles appear on top in the search results: "Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results." There'll be bad knols, but then, there are bad articles on Wikipedia tool.
It'll be interesting to see how Google deals with attack pages, notability issues and spam (blatant spam, "conflict of interest" or otherwise). Udi Manber says "the participation in knols will be completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be of high quality." So, I assume that they'll they won't bother, as long as they're earning good revenues (as with Blogger). Therefore, there'll be no complaints about cruel deletionist admins like me :) And unlike us Wikipedians, Google doesn't bother about criticism from Daniel Brandt and his ilk.
I'm not trying to predict death of Wikipedia. I'm just trying to discuss a worst-case scenario: what happens if we stop getting Google juice, if our best contributors move on to Knol for money and recognition, if our readers (who are also our donors) leave Wikipedia and start patronizing knol.
-- Utkarshraj Atmaram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Utcursch