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-wikipe...
2009/8/7 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
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.
Well, Wolfram Alpha is occasionally actually useful :-)
But Knol was never comparable to Wikipedia. Basically, the media writing about Knol's launch needed to write something to fill space in an article, and Wikipedia was a handy comparison because they're both websites. There was and is no actual similarity. Don't believe the hype.
- d.
Hoi, What I like about Google is that they have the guts to try things out. I like Google because they allow their staff to things that intrigue them. This has brought me gmail among other things. With Google things may fail.
What you express is the expectation that Knol would fail and I am with you, I had the same sentiments. A project like Knol is not of interest because it confirms our assumptions, it is of interest because it challenges our assumptions. I hope we will continue to have our assumptions tested because this will keep us on our toes. Thanks, GerardM
2009/8/7 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com
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-wikipe...
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Another interesting point that knol drives home is : Google has a limited conception of what human collaboration looks like : how to identify it, how to harness it. Their efforts to support collaboration are very one-to-one, small-group or single contributor walled gardens that can be made world-readable, but with few tools to support public writing, and with little interest in public bug-trackers and discussion.
Is it important for the Foundation to help more global organizations figure this out? Should we set an example in new fields of collaboration, or using other tools as well? There are certainly whole communities of creators who don't contribute to Wikimedia because they can't visualize taking the first step -- or are used to creating / remixing / reviewing with different interfaces and tools.
SJ
On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 7:19 AM, Gerard Meijssengerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, What I like about Google is that they have the guts to try things out. I like Google because they allow their staff to things that intrigue them. This has brought me gmail among other things. With Google things may fail.
What you express is the expectation that Knol would fail and I am with you, I had the same sentiments. A project like Knol is not of interest because it confirms our assumptions, it is of interest because it challenges our assumptions. I hope we will continue to have our assumptions tested because this will keep us on our toes. Thanks, GerardM
2009/8/7 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com
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-wikipe...
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Samuel Klein, 10/08/2009 19:15:
Another interesting point that knol drives home is : Google has a limited conception of what human collaboration looks like
Cf. http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?ViewPoint «One of the "social features" of a wiki is that it forces the community to deal with disagreements about content. (In a wiki a given page name can only have one "current" version.) ViewPoint would not require the community to agree--any cooperating subgroup could have its own policies. (This subgroup could be as small as one person, or it could contain all but one community member.) --CliffordAdams» (http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?ViewPointComments)
Nemo
Hoi, Given that Knol has not done what was expected of it, it can be considered a failure. However, Google does learn and it is exactly because the Google engineers are free to spend time on other things that I would hesitate to characterise Google because of Knol. When you consider Google Wave, you find an environment that is very powerful. Very powerful and in my opinion quite capable to support the kind of public writing that Wikipedia is known for.
When we talk about Wikipedia, we are talking about content. This content is currently delivered by MediaWiki, currently because we used other software before MediaWiki. When we find software that can outwiki MediaWiki, we should consider migrating. Consider how it will impact our usability, impact how it will impact people new to our projects. We have nothing to fear, both our software and our content is FREE as long as our software and content remains free, we can experiment and choose how to progress. Thanks, GerardM
2009/8/10 Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com
Another interesting point that knol drives home is : Google has a limited conception of what human collaboration looks like : how to identify it, how to harness it. Their efforts to support collaboration are very one-to-one, small-group or single contributor walled gardens that can be made world-readable, but with few tools to support public writing, and with little interest in public bug-trackers and discussion.
Is it important for the Foundation to help more global organizations figure this out? Should we set an example in new fields of collaboration, or using other tools as well? There are certainly whole communities of creators who don't contribute to Wikimedia because they can't visualize taking the first step -- or are used to creating / remixing / reviewing with different interfaces and tools.
SJ
On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 7:19 AM, Gerard Meijssengerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, What I like about Google is that they have the guts to try things out. I like Google because they allow their staff to things that intrigue them. This has brought me gmail among other things. With Google things may
fail.
What you express is the expectation that Knol would fail and I am with
you,
I had the same sentiments. A project like Knol is not of interest because
it
confirms our assumptions, it is of interest because it challenges our assumptions. I hope we will continue to have our assumptions tested
because
this will keep us on our toes. Thanks, GerardM
2009/8/7 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com
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-wikipe...
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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Slashdotters are following this thread (not David, not Antony :) ). Here is the link to the article "Poor Google Knol Has Gone From A Wikipedia Killer To A Craigslist Wannabe":
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/11/poor-google-knol-has-gone-from-a-wikipe...
On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 1:38 AM, Milos Rancicmillosh@gmail.com wrote:
Slashdotters are following this thread (not David, not Antony :) ). Here is the link to the article "Poor Google Knol Has Gone From A Wikipedia Killer To A Craigslist Wannabe":
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/11/poor-google-knol-has-gone-from-a-wikipe...
Ah, someone already posted that in this thread :)
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