[Foundation-l] Knol, a year later

[Milos Rancic]

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-wikipedia-and-wikimedia/