[WikiEN-l] 6 months later: Knol update

[Alvaro García]

Besides, it has been said that there are thousands of duplicated  
articles...


--
Alvaro

On 21-01-2009, at 12:51, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA512
>
> 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"
>>
>> To be sure, Knol has a lot of very serious problems with it.  But  
>> it's only
>> 6 months old.  The concept is far from finalized.  6 months into  
>> Jimmy
>> Wales' encyclopedia dream he was still working on Nupedia.
>>
>> Here's the Wikipedia on George Bush 19 months into Wikipedia:
>> http://web.archive.org/web/20020817062610/www.wikipedia.com/wiki/George_Bush
>>
>> How long will it take you to find a better article on Barack Obama  
>> in Knol?
>
> 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
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
>
> iEYEAREKAAYFAkl3RIsACgkQvpDo5Pfl1oJWXwCfVL0x328tmey5rElGolu44PQj
> 2RcAoIhofvJUWXmj0HoeJwbl+kPSftIB
> =kEJG
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l