[Wikipedia-l] Knol

[Steven Walling]

There has been a lot of blog buzz charting this as a possible competitor to
Wikipedia. And at first it seemed quite real, and honestly, quite
frightening to me. But if you read the post carefully, I don't think that
ideas such as "For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the
same subject." and "...will include the opinions and points of view of the
authors." sounds like a competition for a source of reliable information. To
get reliable info, students and other people  who are looking for "the first
thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to
read" aren't going to want to read ten different articles on the Holocaust
to get the full perspective. They need one, comprehensive unbiased source
for an introduction.

On Dec 13, 2007 9:15 PM, cohesion <cohesion at sleepyhead.org> wrote:

> "Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to
> try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a
> unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a
> particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The
> tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of
> testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to
> share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project."
>
> From google
> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html
>
> Just wondering what people think. :)
>
> Judson
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cohesion
>
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