On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Anthony wrote: > On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 10:30 AM, Gwern Branwen wrote: >> >> As will surprise none of the Knol nay-sayers here (in which number I >> believe I can count myself), Knol hasn't done too great. > > Compared to what? I can't imagine Knol is much worse than Wikipedia when it > was 6 months old. Knol just published its 100,000th article. When > Wikipedia was 5 months old, it said on the main page "We've got over 6,000 > pages already. We want to make over 100,000." The Wayback machine then > skips ahead 5 more months, by which point Wikipedia brags "We started in > January 2001 and already have over 13,000 articles. We want to make over > 100,000, so let's get to work"

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Anthony wrote: With Wikipedia by this point, the basic concept of collaboration had been proved. With Knol, we see only the divisiveness of the payments system*, and a few isolated authors striving on their own. More to the point: yes, we should expect more of Knol than of Wikipedia at similar stages! Knol has, by virtue of its position in time, *numerous* advantages over Nupedia/Wikipedia. We should expect a lot more. It has: 1) A clear license regime. Thanks to 8 years of Creative Commons, the choice is not limited to just the GFDL (with its many problems). 2) 8 years of hardware advances, or approximately 5 iterations of Moore's law. 3) 8 years of wiki development, demonstrating dead ends, the good ideas, & what remains to be improved. Imagine if Knol had to start with the state of the art in 2001. It would be truly gruesome. (Anyone looked at the very old Wikipedias in Nostalgia, or old usemod wikis like Ward's? They're hideous and unusable! They make me quite grateful for 2009 MediaWiki with all its modern conveniences.) 4) The backing of a commercial juggernaut. Quite aside from Knol's hosting being a) very good; and b) not the Knol devs' concern, Google's backing offers an array of advantages, from certainty to excellent software development resources**, such as: 5) Massive publicity. To be facetious, at launch Knol had infinitely more publicity than did Wikipedia. 6) A public educated to read wikis, and to use them. How many people could Wikipedia hope to draw on at day 1 - that cared even a little about Free content, that knew what a wiki was, that wouldn't dismiss it as hopeless, and had an editing familiarity with wikis? Darned few. We had to constantly evangelize and educate people about wikis, and by dint of unremitting effort create the English Wikipedia and make it interesting and valuable enough that people would contribute who didn't fulfill any of those criteria. En was the existence proof that large-scale wikis were possible and valuable. Knol, on the other hand, can draw immediately on that pool of people Wikipedia created. 7) A model targeted directly at people unhappy with Wikipedia. Are you an expert tired of 'anti-expertism' on Wikipedia? Why try to get along with those bumpkins when you could have your own article completely to yourself on Google Knol (and get paid for't)? Wikipedia appealed to those unhappy with Nupedia. Nupedia when Wikipedia launched was a lot smaller than Wikipedia was when Knol launched. I think this pool of possible contributors was thus also much larger for Knol than it was for Wikipedia. etc. etc. * If I weren't so lazy, this is where I'd cite some of the studies showing paying some contributors to FLOSS projects reduces volunteerism. ** Not to denigrate the efforts of Magnus and Tim and all the other MediaWiki developers over the years, but one simply expects more of full-time developers experienced with the famous Google infrastructure and supposedly at Google's standards of excellence. - -- gwern _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l