Re: [Foundation-l] Knol, a year later

More than a year ago Google lunched Knol. It was a sensation then (BTW, it was a sensation for more time than Wolfram Alpha was). Today I just may say that I don't remember when I heard for the Knol last time. More than a year ago, I've wrote a blog post about Knol [1] (I didn't read it again, so I am not so sure what did I write there :) ) and today I've got one comment about Knol at my blog post. Person who made it introduced himself as Michael: "There is the Verifiability of Knol. I never found anything relevant or reliable on knol. Knol is starting to be used as a spam platform and self promotion platform. There are high chances that the info you get from knol is false or subiective, not to say that I’ve found articles promoting xenofobism, antisemitism and a lot of ill guided authors. At this time knol seem to be nothing more than a blog platform (with clever marketing) where people can write anything they want. I hardly see any resilience between Wikipedia and Knol, Wikipedia has Verifiability (”editors should provide a reliable source for quotations and for any material that is challenged or likely to be challenged”) while on knol you can write any phantasmagoric or lunatic thing you want nobody really cares if it’s false or true or what repercussions may have on people seeking knowledge. Knol has nothing to do with knowledge, it’s just library of opinions not knowledge, unless we agree on the fact that anything that can be written by anybody is knowledge. So from my point of view knol should not be taken serious at this time, at least not more serious than anybody’s blog on the internet." My response is: "Michael, thanks for the comment. Yes, I’ve supposed, at Knol’s beginnings, that bias may become its significant problem. It doesn’t have self-regulation and collaboration as a default, like Wikipedia has. And the product is obviously bad. We’ve got, also, one significant lesson: An organization which is very good in many businesses, like Google is, don’t need to be even average in another business. (Wikia is, for example, much better than Knol in that business.) Also, I think that voluntarily knowledge building can’t be built as a [commercial] business model. Nobody cares to make a lot of money to someone else and almost nothing for herself, but a lot of humans care to build knowledge for all of us." [1] - http://millosh.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/google-knol-and-the-future-of-wikip… _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l