As perhaps some people here will recall, I was always skeptical of Knol's ability to enter the collaborative knowledge space. The reasons discussed here, including SJ's mentions of the issues of structuring public collaboration, are no doubt valid, but to me -- and of course it may be said that this is my Lawyer Vision(tm) kicking in -- the primary problem for Knol was lack of compatibility with the existing dominant free licenses used by Wikimedia projects and others. In short, it was difficult for Knol to build on the work of other collaborative freely licensed projects without, as a practical matter, violating those licenses. (We saw countless examples of people attempting to import Wikipedia content into Knol, for example, and played a bit of whack-a-mole with those folks.)
But to me the takeaway from this error of Knol's licensing design is not that Knol can't work -- it's that it actually could work, if properly thought through. So my view right now is the Wikimedia community can't be complacent about Knol's apparent failure -- properly adjusted and redesigned, it could have quite an impact on us. We're going to have to continue to give serious attention to all the issues, from quality to community to legality, that give us an advantage in terms of fueling creative collaboration, as we go forward.
The next Knol can't be relied upon to make the same mistakes.
--Mike
2009/8/10 Mike Godwin mnemonic@gmail.com:
But to me the takeaway from this error of Knol's licensing design is not that Knol can't work -- it's that it actually could work, if properly thought through. So my view right now is the Wikimedia community can't be complacent about Knol's apparent failure -- properly adjusted and redesigned, it could have quite an impact on us. We're going to have to continue to give serious attention to all the issues, from quality to community to legality, that give us an advantage in terms of fueling creative collaboration, as we go forward. The next Knol can't be relied upon to make the same mistakes.
Whuh?
Educational free content production is not competition with us. It's success for us.
Knol, as first put forward, looked like about.com - factual signed articles. If it had worked, that would have been fantastic as a reference source.
In what way would a successful version of Knol actually be a problem for us? If ten other websites fulfill WMF's mission without WMF having to pay the hosting bills, how is that a problem for us? I really don't see it.
- d.
2009/8/10 Mike Godwin mnemonic@gmail.com:
But to me the takeaway from this error of Knol's licensing design is not that Knol can't work -- it's that it actually could work, if properly thought through. Â So my view right now is the Wikimedia community can't be complacent about Knol's apparent failure -- properly adjusted and redesigned, it could have quite an impact on us. Â We're going to have to continue to give serious attention to all the issues, from quality to community to legality, that give us an advantage in terms of fueling creative collaboration, as we go forward. The next Knol can't be relied upon to make the same mistakes.
Whuh?
Educational free content production is not competition with us. It's success for us.
Knol, as first put forward, looked like about.com - factual signed articles. If it had worked, that would have been fantastic as a reference source.
In what way would a successful version of Knol actually be a problem for us? If ten other websites fulfill WMF's mission without WMF having to pay the hosting bills, how is that a problem for us? I really don't see it.
- d.
Didn't you ever play Monopoly?
Fred
2009/8/10 Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net:
Didn't you ever play Monopoly?
The point is that this is not a zero-sum game. If Knol and Citizendium and OpenSite get it together and rocket to #1, #2 and #3 websites, that'll be a fulfilment of our mission:
"Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment."
If someone else does the actual work, fine! It doesn't actually have to be WMF doing it.
- d.
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 2:19 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
If someone else does the actual work, fine! It doesn't actually have to be WMF doing it.
Sure, as a volunteer, you'll say that. Godwin is a paid employee though, not a volunteer.
On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 8:27 AM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 2:19 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
If someone else does the actual work, fine! It doesn't actually have to be WMF doing it.
Sure, as a volunteer, you'll say that. Godwin is a paid employee though, not a volunteer.
I'm going to apologize for that comment, as it was a terrible assumption of bad faith.
Many volunteers actually enjoy their work, after all.
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 2:08 PM, David Gerarddgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Whuh?
Educational free content production is not competition with us. It's success for us.
Which isn't exactly what Knol is... and probably won't be what next-knol will be.
Of course, knol never really was something likely to compete with Wikipedia.
Knol, as first put forward, looked like about.com - factual signed articles. If it had worked, that would have been fantastic as a reference source.
In what way would a successful version of Knol actually be a problem for us? If ten other websites fulfill WMF's mission without WMF having to pay the hosting bills, how is that a problem for us? I really don't see it.
The risk is that something will come about which doesn't share the bulk of our mission (i.e. isn't free content) but which is a sufficient replacement for the bulk of the readership.
Wikipedia could be replaced by something which was greatly inferior based on many metrics which we, collectively, consider important but which was superior in other ways (better marketed; less likely to randomly display penises on inappropriate articles; etc).
I think it's a real risk, and that risk is why we have to be diligent at also being good a marketing, creating things like stable versions and basically trying to come up with every way of being great that we can which doesn't conflict with the core mission.
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 11:17 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.comwrote:
The risk is that something will come about which doesn't share the bulk of our mission (i.e. isn't free content) but which is a sufficient replacement for the bulk of the readership.
Greg frames one of my concerns quite eloquently here.
Wikipedia could be replaced by something which was greatly inferior based on many metrics which we, collectively, consider important but which was superior in other ways (better marketed; less likely to randomly display penises on inappropriate articles; etc).
And here too.
--Mike
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 2:08 PM, David Gerarddgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/8/10 Mike Godwin mnemonic@gmail.com:
the primary problem for Knol was lack of compatibility with the existing dominant free licenses used by Wikimedia projects and others. In short, it was difficult for Knol to build on the work of other collaborative freely licensed projects without, as a practical matter, violating those licenses...
<
... to me the takeaway from this error of Knol's licensing design is not that Knol can't work -- it's that it actually could work, if properly thought through.
In what way would a successful version of Knol actually be a problem for us? If ten other websites fulfill WMF's mission without WMF having to pay the hosting bills, how is that a problem for us? I really don't see it.
I was about to write a similar reply. One of the great joys of our work is that when more people join in, whether or not they are doing it through a 'central' site, they are supporting the mission of the projects. Having a hundred groups or services supporting free knowledge collaboration is better than having just a few; and it benefits us to help projects such as Knol pick the right licenses -- ones that let them cooperate smoothly with Wikipedia -- and foster a sense of vital collaboration that we all would like to see become the norm in Internet services, not a Wikipedia specialty.
Greg writes:
The risk is that something will come about which doesn't share the bulk of our mission (i.e. isn't free content) but which is a sufficient replacement for the bulk of the readership.
I think the parts of our mission that few other projects have adopted or recognized are the commitment to completely open participation, free licensing, and community ownership of (oversight, style guides, &c). Each of these three elements dramatically changes the cost of maintenance, the flexibility and scalability of responses to new ideas, the distribution of knowledge through secondary channels, and the persistence of systemic bias.
The best way to minimize the risk of these elements being lost in the future is to make them more universal in our society, and not allow these ideas to be bound too tightly to Wikipedia alone. Making Wiktionary, Wikibooks and sister projects more successful is one way to achieve this; encouraging other global knowledge projects to adopt these principles is another.
SJ
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 11:37 AM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
I was about to write a similar reply. One of the great joys of our work is that when more people join in, whether or not they are doing it through a 'central' site, they are supporting the mission of the projects. Having a hundred groups or services supporting free knowledge collaboration is better than having just a few; and it benefits us to help projects such as Knol pick the right licenses -- ones that let them cooperate smoothly with Wikipedia -- and foster a sense of vital collaboration that we all would like to see become the norm in Internet services, not a Wikipedia specialty.
Please understand me when I say I think it would have been great if Knol had (among other things) picked the right licenses. My actual words should not be read as saying that the collaborative effort represented by Wikipedia (and other projects) should be confined to Wikimedia projects alone. A more nuanced reading, I think, would recognize that I was trying to underscore the possibility that a project only 60 percent as good at fulfilling our mission could still replace us or make us irrelevant -- losing the values and culture and even much of the content we have helped create. Any study of the history of economics sees patterns like this all the time. I am suggesting we need not be passive victims of such a pattern, and that active spread of the collaborative culture we believe in requires something like eternal vigilance. In this respect, my views are as intense as, say, rms's.
The best way to minimize the risk of these elements being lost in the
future is to make them more universal in our society, and not allow these ideas to be bound too tightly to Wikipedia alone. Making Wiktionary, Wikibooks and sister projects more successful is one way to achieve this; encouraging other global knowledge projects to adopt these principles is another.
I want to gently suggest that while there are many ways to make these elements more universal in our society, but moral suasion on mailing lists is perhaps not the dominant tactic.
--Mike
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 11:08 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Educational free content production is not competition with us. It's success for us.
Of course Knol is not in competition with us, and what I wrote should not be worried about competition. It should be understood as being worried about being complacent with regard to our successes.
I can give you some models in which Knol, properly structured, could have replaced us altogether. In some sense that might be a victory for free culture, but I see no particular reason to root for our being replaced just yet.
Knol, as first put forward, looked like about.com - factual signed articles. If it had worked, that would have been fantastic as a reference source.
And yet it didn't work. The reasons it didn't work should inform our own decisionmaking going forward.
In what way would a successful version of Knol actually be a problem for us? If ten other websites fulfill WMF's mission without WMF having to pay the hosting bills, how is that a problem for us? I really don't see it.
The key would be whether the ten other websites fulfill WMF's mission, right? What if they fulfill 50 percent of WMF's mission but one of the results of their success is that the Wikimedia community fades away?
There are other ways to analyze these issues besides economic competition models, and I don't even think of economics primarily when I think of Knol (as I had hoped my initial posting made clear). Evolution and natural selection are pretty merciless. If there are things we value about Wikimedian projects and culture, we have to give thought to how to preserve and promote and evolve them in an environment that has other entities playing similar (but not the same) roles. Unless one hopes that the ultimate goal of WMF simply is to fade away, and lose whatever made it uniquely valuable.
Please go back and take a look at my posting about Knol and try to understand it not as concern about competition, but concern about preservation.
It's entirely possible for there to be a Gresham's Law with regard to collaborative encyclopedias, in my view.
--Mike
2009/8/10 Mike Godwin mnemonic@gmail.com:
It's entirely possible for there to be a Gresham's Law with regard to collaborative encyclopedias, in my view.
Encyclopedia Dramatica is indeed the only way to keep up with 4chan ...
- d.
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 2:38 PM, Mike Godwinmnemonic@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 11:08 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I can give you some models in which Knol, properly structured, could have replaced us altogether. In some sense that might be a victory for free culture, but I see no particular reason to root for our being replaced just yet.
An interesting concept. It's hard to replace an open collaborative process, but I think this is a subject worthy of a planning workshop at Wikimania. The advantage of being open and minimal-overhead is that we can discuss great improvements publicly, and implement them.
The key would be whether the ten other websites fulfill WMF's mission, right? What if they fulfill 50 percent of WMF's mission but one of the results of their success is that the Wikimedia community fades away?
The current active community is largely here for reasons of belief in our core mission. There are so many important and interesting projects that we don't have time as a community to address -- if some new group comes along and starts addressing one of them under a compatible license, I don't see our current contributors somehow being too inflexible to redirect their efforts. (and it seems likely that over time we would learn from the new creators, find out what feedback and engagement they liked from the new system that WP (for instance) didn't provide, and help them improve and expand our current community)
There are other ways to analyze these issues besides economic competition models, and I don't even think of economics primarily when I think of Knol (as I had hoped my initial posting made clear). Evolution and natural selection are pretty merciless. If there are things we value about Wikimedian projects and culture, we have to give thought to how to preserve and promote and evolve them in an environment that has other entities playing similar (but not the same) roles. Unless one hopes that the
From an evolutionary standpoint, mixing with other cultures and
contributing to them without trying to encapsulate them is an effective way to propagate ideas and memes.
It's entirely possible for there to be a Gresham's Law with regard to collaborative encyclopedias, in my view.
I understand that your original comment was about preservation. I don't think that Gresham's Law applies in the realm of non-rival knowledge and services. It might in the realm of 'public attention' -- though today it is common for people to take in duplicate free information.
a project only 60 percent as good at fulfilling our mission could still replace us or make us irrelevant -- losing the values and culture and even much of the content we have helped create. Any study of the history of economics sees
< patterns like this all the time... active spread of the collaborative culture we
believe in requires something like eternal vigilance.
How could we lose the content we have helped create? I agree that we could do more to present the principles that support Wikipedia to our readers. The idea of public sharing and a collective commons are just as popular as WP itself, but need reinforcement.
while there are many ways to make these elements more universal in our society, but moral suasion on mailing lists is perhaps not the dominant tactic.
Neither do emails keep million-person collaborations from becoming irrelevant, yet they are part of the process.
We can invest effort as a community in 'eternal vigilance', uniting against a common foe, and fending off memetic predators -- or we can invest effort in spreading ideas and sharing best practices in the spirit of empowering others to learn from our discoveries. There is an opportunity cost either way.
Sj
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 21:02, Samuel Kleinmeta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
It's hard to replace an open collaborative process,
On the contrary. I believe most of us cannot concentrate working power ("human resources") to, say, 5 full-fledged knowledge recording community. Most people tend to have a favourite project to aim attention at, and others get less and less time.
If there was 3 equally successful projects mimicking Wikipedia it's very well possible that a significant amount of contributors would pick one project with 1/5th of the contributors (which would [or may] result inferior content due to lower community review) while others may lose interest altogether since they wouldn't be adventurous enough to re-learn the stupid habits of yet another community, or wouldn't want to contribute to a project fractional in size.
This is not a linear, logical, easy to describe process. People cannot be moved or reassigned between communities, and by dividing them each project may get less than the proportional amount of contributors joined. Or more, if they'd be successful in specialisation and gather a better functioning community (which is not hard in the case of WP communities, mind you).
As well as WP's current success this process is a mistery for future tellers. I'm not sure more wikipedia-like projects would be better, nor that it'd be worse. I guess time have the habit of coming up with new contestants all the time, and one is bound to succeed. All I want is that it should be a free content open project.
The name doesn't really matter. Wikipedia or else.
Because knowledge wants to be free, after all.
grin
The number of people available is not limited to the current number. There are many potential contributors to an encyclopedia who for one reason or another are unwilling to work at Wikipedia. There are many more who would be attracted by the competition.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 3:41 PM, Peter Gervaigrinapo@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 21:02, Samuel Kleinmeta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
It's hard to replace an open collaborative process,
On the contrary. I believe most of us cannot concentrate working power ("human resources") to, say, 5 full-fledged knowledge recording community. Most people tend to have a favourite project to aim attention at, and others get less and less time.
If there was 3 equally successful projects mimicking Wikipedia it's very well possible that a significant amount of contributors would pick one project with 1/5th of the contributors (which would [or may] result inferior content due to lower community review) while others may lose interest altogether since they wouldn't be adventurous enough to re-learn the stupid habits of yet another community, or wouldn't want to contribute to a project fractional in size.
This is not a linear, logical, easy to describe process. People cannot be moved or reassigned between communities, and by dividing them each project may get less than the proportional amount of contributors joined. Or more, if they'd be successful in specialisation and gather a better functioning community (which is not hard in the case of WP communities, mind you).
As well as WP's current success this process is a mistery for future tellers. I'm not sure more wikipedia-like projects would be better, nor that it'd be worse. I guess time have the habit of coming up with new contestants all the time, and one is bound to succeed. All I want is that it should be a free content open project.
The name doesn't really matter. Wikipedia or else.
Because knowledge wants to be free, after all.
grin
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 21:48, David Goodmandgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
The number of people available is not limited to the current number.
As well as the current number isn't stable. :-) People come and go, sink in wikipedia or get wikistress and go away.
There are many potential contributors to an encyclopedia who for one reason or another are unwilling to work at Wikipedia.
I accept that.
There are many more who would be attracted by the competition.
That's a hypothesis. :-)
It's well possible that a competition with wrong orientation would alienate more people from offering their time for free than not. I just wanted to comment that we cannot tell for sure beforehand.
I do not worry about competition since it's bound to happen, as projects mature, then get old, then die (or rather go into oblivion). Wikipedia will surely not last forever, and great ideas born all the time, some with great possibilities. But it's important to see that some kinds of projects can cause more harm than good without any original bad intent, as community dynamics is way too complex to foretell. It's not wise to blindly welcome anything and anybody. I'd say, we watch, we learn and we'll see.
grin
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 12:02 PM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
An interesting concept. It's hard to replace an open collaborative process, but I think this is a subject worthy of a planning workshop at Wikimania. The advantage of being open and minimal-overhead is that we can discuss great improvements publicly, and implement them.
This of course is why open democracies are never superseded by more restrictive governance. Because democracy is just naturally more successful, see?
The key would be whether the ten other websites fulfill WMF's mission, right? What if they fulfill 50 percent of WMF's mission but one of the results of their success is that the Wikimedia community fades away?
The current active community is largely here for reasons of belief in our core mission. There are so many important and interesting projects that we don't have time as a community to address -- if some new group comes along and starts addressing one of them under a compatible license, I don't see our current contributors somehow being too inflexible to redirect their efforts. (and it seems likely that over time we would learn from the new creators, find out what feedback and engagement they liked from the new system that WP (for instance) didn't provide, and help them improve and expand our current community)
At first I couldn't see how you had missed the point here -- you seem to assume the community has limitless human labor and resources, and I think there is every reason to believe it does not, including recent statistical data. But then I read your next comments and understood better:
I understand that your original comment was about preservation. I don't think that Gresham's Law applies in the realm of non-rival knowledge and services. It might in the realm of 'public attention' -- though today it is common for people to take in duplicate free information.
The human resources it takes to build, maintain, preserve, and expand information are rivalrous. But don't take my word for it -- ask economists.
How could we lose the content we have helped create?
Bruce Sterling identifies many ways in which this can happen, perhaps most notably in the Dead Media Project. Civilizations lose information all the time if it's not actively maintained.
We can invest effort as a community in 'eternal vigilance', uniting against a common foe,
This "common foe" thing is something you've made up out of whole cloth. Not one word I've written has posited or imagined a "common foe". Perhaps you have confused my writings with someone else's?
and fending off memetic predators
Memetic predators? What? Where is this coming from?
--Mike
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 3:57 PM, Mike Godwinmnemonic@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 12:02 PM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
An interesting concept. It's hard to replace an open collaborative process, but I think this is a subject worthy of a planning workshop
This of course is why open democracies are never superseded by more
Can you name some free knowledge or free software collaborations that have been replaced by something less open or collaborative? I'd still like to see a longer discussion or workshop on the subject.
The human resources it takes to build, maintain, preserve, and expand information are rivalrous. But don't take my word for it -- ask economists.
<
How could we lose the content we have helped create?
Bruce Sterling identifies many ways in which this can happen, perhaps most notably in the Dead Media Project. Civilizations lose information all the time if it's not actively maintained.
Even deadmedia.org seems to be dead (ouch). I feel as though this thread is starting to mix together - the risk of another site replacing Wikipedia for readers, - the risk of the contributing community finding a project that better suits their interests in collaboration and sharing knowledge; - the risk of Wikimedia projects losing some of their current ideals - the risk of current Wikimedia material being ignored by future reference works
The last two could happen even if no other project tries to tackle the same problem.
We can invest effort as a community in 'eternal vigilance', uniting against a common foe,
This "common foe" thing is something you've made up out of whole cloth. Not one word I've written has posited or imagined a "common foe". Perhaps you have confused my writings with someone else's?
I understood you to suggest eternal vigilance was needed to maintain a sort of market dominance, though I'm not certain of the market you have in mind. The foe would be projects that don't satisfy (enough of) wikimedia's ideals and threaten to siphon off contributors.
and fending off memetic predators
Memetic predators? What? Where is this coming from?
See above. If such a less-idealistic project tries to capture the interest of people who currently love and contribute to Wikipedia, it is preying on those who have currently taken to the wiki and open-collaboration memes (presumably replacing them with other memes that are less free, or less scalable).
The meme of free sharing of tools and knowledge as a stepping stone to accomplishing amazingly great things, such as making the Internet not suck, is a powerful one. But you're right that we need to work to keep it from being distorted over time.
SJ
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/11/poor-google-knol-has-gone-from-a-wikipe...
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 9:02 PM, Samuel Kleinmeta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
The current active community is largely here for reasons of belief in our core mission. There are so many important and interesting projects that we don't have time as a community to address -- if some new group comes along and starts addressing one of them under a compatible license, I don't see our current contributors somehow being too inflexible to redirect their efforts. (and it seems likely that over time we would learn from the new creators, find out what feedback and engagement they liked from the new system that WP (for instance) didn't provide, and help them improve and expand our current community)
This is a good point. I am writing a project proposal on Strategy wiki which should address this issue. Instead of [[meta:Proposals for new projects]] we should actively work on this issue: some projects we would be able to add into Wikimedia family, a lot of them we won't, but we should promote some ideas to the wider community, so some other groups can make them.
a project only 60 percent as good at fulfilling our mission could still replace us or make us irrelevant -- losing the values and culture and even much of the content we have helped create. Any study of the history of economics sees patterns like this all the time... active spread of the collaborative culture we believe in requires something like eternal vigilance.
How could we lose the content we have helped create? I agree that we could do more to present the principles that support Wikipedia to our readers. The idea of public sharing and a collective commons are just as popular as WP itself, but need reinforcement.
I agree with this Mike's point.
I believe that [knowledge-]sharing culture is strong enough. But, I don't want to base my decisions on my beliefs, as well as I would be very upset if I see that WMF is making decisions based on beliefs of the Board and staff members.
As we don't know how stable our strength is, we should default our decisions to resolute protection of our core goals. It is better to be cautious and spend more efforts on something which don't need to be necessary, than to gamble with faith in the better future.
It doesn't mean that we should be hostile toward other free knowledge projects, of course. It does mean that we should actively lead knowledge-sharing culture: to analyze actively what other projects mean to our goals, to help those which have similar characteristics to our projects, to point on problems of other projects. Wikimedia community is becoming mature enough to take that responsibility.
(So, one more idea for the Strategy plan: Make a group which should deal with other free knowledge projects. The goal of this group shouldn't be dealing FSF or CC, but with wiki and other free knowledge projects and communities.)
Some weeks ago I had an opportunity to talk with a Google employee about a number of topics. One of the things we discussed was Knol.
Setting aside the way it may have been marketed in the popular press at the time, she suggested that Google does not currently see Knol as a collaborative medium in the way Wikipedia is. Rather, they currently regard Knol as more of a web publishing platform. In other words, it is a place for individuals and small groups to post their work online with a certain degree of infrastructure and visibility (and Google ads, of course).
Whether Knol has distinguished itself from other ways of publishing online, I don't know, though I haven't seen much evidence of that. However, she also made the more interesting point that most of Google's current development efforts with Knol are focused towards foreign languages and scripts. By providing a high level of UTF-8 support, they seem to be hoping that they can capture a significant portion of the non-English web publishing community, which is of course a rapidly growing segment that isn't always well supported by some current offerings.
Rather than being the next Wikipedia, maybe a better analogy would be to think of Knol as the next Geocities.
-Robert Rohde
2009/8/10 Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com:
Some weeks ago I had an opportunity to talk with a Google employee about a number of topics. One of the things we discussed was Knol. Setting aside the way it may have been marketed in the popular press at the time, she suggested that Google does not currently see Knol as a collaborative medium in the way Wikipedia is. Rather, they currently regard Knol as more of a web publishing platform. In other words, it is a place for individuals and small groups to post their work online with a certain degree of infrastructure and visibility (and Google ads, of course).
Yes. Google never pushed Knol as a "Wikipedia killer" and at no time, before or since launch, was it put forward by Google as something that could replace Wikipedia.
The comparison to Wikipedia was a complete media fiction, invented from the need to fill space. It has no other basis.
Rather than being the next Wikipedia, maybe a better analogy would be to think of Knol as the next Geocities.
ooh, ouch. I'd hope "the next about.com" at least.
- d.
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 8:15 PM, Robert Rohderarohde@gmail.com wrote:
Some weeks ago I had an opportunity to talk with a Google employee about a number of topics. One of the things we discussed was Knol.
Setting aside the way it may have been marketed in the popular press at the time, she suggested that Google does not currently see Knol as a collaborative medium in the way Wikipedia is. Rather, they currently regard Knol as more of a web publishing platform. In other words, it is a place for individuals and small groups to post their work online with a certain degree of infrastructure and visibility (and Google ads, of course).
Whether Knol has distinguished itself from other ways of publishing online, I don't know, though I haven't seen much evidence of that. However, she also made the more interesting point that most of Google's current development efforts with Knol are focused towards foreign languages and scripts. By providing a high level of UTF-8 support, they seem to be hoping that they can capture a significant portion of the non-English web publishing community, which is of course a rapidly growing segment that isn't always well supported by some current offerings.
Rather than being the next Wikipedia, maybe a better analogy would be to think of Knol as the next Geocities.
Hm. Google Sites is much better platform for web publishing. But, it is not so new to see that Google has internal project competition (cf. Google Notebook and Google Docs, for example). While it may be good in the sense of diversification, I think that they could do much better with integrating features of different projects. For example, public comments and Knol-like categorization may make Google Sites much richer.
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 1:57 PM, Mike Godwin mnemonic@gmail.com wrote:
In short, it was difficult for Knol to build on the work of other collaborative freely licensed projects without, as a practical matter, violating those licenses. (We saw countless examples of people attempting to import Wikipedia content into Knol, for example, and played a bit of whack-a-mole with those folks.)
Huh? Whack-a-mole? I imported Wikipedia content into Knol, under the GFDL, and never was even asked to take it down.
The problem isn't the licensing. The problem is duplicate content. Unless *maybe* if you're one of the top experts in the world for the topic, people don't want to read your 95% Wikipedia and 5% original contribution. Even if you are one of the top experts in the world for the topic, you're better off presenting your 5% contribution as a standalone article, criticizing the Wikipedia article and referencing Wikipedia by link.
But to me the takeaway from this error of Knol's licensing design is not
that Knol can't work -- it's that it actually could work, if properly thought through. So my view right now is the Wikimedia community can't be complacent about Knol's apparent failure -- properly adjusted and redesigned, it could have quite an impact on us.
Better internal linking is the most needed adjustment/redesign. An "encyclopedia that anyone can add an article to", with maybe an allowance for minor edit suggestions and collaborations of small well-knit teams, is an interesting twist that could help provide useful information that Wikipedia doesn't and in fact can't provide.
Anthony
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org