On Dec 14, 2007 6:27 AM, Utkarshraj Atmaram utcursch@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Good. Wikipedia needs to be shaken up a bit. :-) I suspect Google's software and interface will be orders of magnitude more usable that ours, and attract more non-technical users, which will in turn promote pressure to get more developers to fix up the site. Competition should be welcome.
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.
I wonder if the potential exists for a Wikipedia clone to make revenue from ads, and then distribute that revenue to the "best" editors based on trust networks and metrics of neutrality, etc. Reward people for making desirable edits that are neutral, reliably sourced, civil, and so on. If they set it up well and kept the open source licensing, I'd migrate.
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.
Hey, if they improve on Wikipedia, they deserve any user migration they get, and humanity will be better for it.
On Dec 14, 2007 4:24 PM, Will Beback will.beback.1@gmail.com wrote:
I predict that some enterprising souls will quickly "create" knols by using GFDL text from Wikipedia, thus getting paid for the work of others.
Step 1: Mirror Wikipedia Step 2: Surround it with ads and use search engine optimization Step 3: Profit