[WikiEN-l] Google Knol: Move over Wikipedia?

[Omegatron]

On Dec 14, 2007 6:27 AM, Utkarshraj Atmaram <utcursch at 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 at 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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks