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Google's "Knol" Reinvents Wikipedia
teslatug writes "Google appears to be reinventing Wikipedia with their new product that they call knol (not yet publicly available). In an attempt to gather human knowledge, Google will accept articles from users who will be credited with the article by name. If they want, they can allow ads to appear alongside the content and they will be getting a share of the profits if that's the case. Other users will be allowed to rate, edit or comment on the articles. The content does not have to be exclusive to Google but no mention is made on any license for it. Is this a better model for free information gathering?"
Google'a Knol
Klingon?
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Google is trying to promote knol as a new buzzword meaning "a unit of knowledge."
I wonder how many knol's Slashdot is worth?
My blog
The headline, blurb and link create a perfect storm of incomprehensibility -- that I had to go to Wikipedia to figure out what the hell this is about isn't an auspicious beginning, and I still have no idea what "Google'a" is.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
All they're basically proposing is that you write an article as best as you can and they host it, giving you a tiny share of the revenue it generates. So instead of watching edit wars and being able to check out multiple opinions you now have to take the whole article as it is. There might even be small errors in there that would otherwise have been fixed by peers.
I understand that knowing the author could give more weight to the information of an article...I just don't understand how this is anything worth talking about or worth comparing to wikipedia.
Wikipedia is getting something of a reputation for being elitist and at times discriminatory without justification. Whatever the truth, when such labels are applied people are usually ripe for alternatives.
Google did this once before, in spite of what they say to the contrary, against Sourceforge. In that case, good though they are, Sourceforge was becoming quite unreliable for non paying users, and their service, while including many wonderful options, was unweildy to use.
Along came google with google code. It's a simpler service, nowhere near the features of sourceforge, but for sheer simplicity it's a joy. I wasn't alone in moving there.
Will I use knol? Well it might be just the place to place some articles derived from papers I've published, we shall see.
Quick, someone register knol.org, knol.net, knol.info.. bwaaah why am I posting this message.. off to domain name services!
Wikipedia is having enough trouble trying to stop people from editing content to cast the groups they represent in a better light; Giving them the opportunity to create their own misleading articles that can make them money through ads as well doesn't sound promising. Add to that the fact that people without agendas who share information on wikis now surely must be doing it for the love of sharing information or the love of the topic its self; ad money will only end up encouraging less passionate people to post whatever pops into their heads just to get a page running for the ad support.
This is a feature I've long since looked for in a website that has factual content, like Wikipedia (minus chip-on-shoulder admins). Krol should prevent astro-turfing well, as long as Google protects against dupes and has other beneficial restrictions.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Two thoughts come to mind:
1) This is worse than Wikipedia... how, exactly? One would think that ad revenue would be proportional to the relevancy and quality of the article content. The only question I have is who gets a cut of the money if someone makes a major revision to an article.
2) Can you absolutely quantify how much it costs you to visit a page with a Google ad banner? Wikipedia isn't free either - SOMEBODY has to pay for it. At some level everything needs to be paid for.
=Smidge=
At first look the model seems to be about.com, which offered information on subjects as presented by named experts, which is pretty much the reverse of how Wikipedia works. As ideas go, it's not a bad one and I can see the potential for the use of trust or reputation to maintain the veracity of information, as I'm sure Google have done. It brings up several other questions of course, such as Google finally becoming a content provider, and how it's going to be managed - even if it is all user maintained the potential for another cabal is always on the horizon.
Knol claims to be open to all knowledge of entertainment so it's possible it could be seen as a safe haven for these fans & anyone who's been struck by the notability hammer. I could see them hopping on the wayback machine and just putting their words back into digital print
I never did see anything mentioned about the horror case of me writing my own autobiography as a knol. That wasn't addressed but I guess they'll flesh that stuff out. It'll be interesting to see where they draw the line and, like you said, who moves to the other model.
My work here is dung.
> You see that thing on the right of the screenshot? That's an "Ads by Google" box. When I view a page and that
> guy is there, it isn't free anymore.
No, it's free, because you're not paying for it. Free newspapers are free, regardless of the fact that advertisers paid to have their ads inserted. Free parties are free regardless of the fact that someone paid for the records/PA etc. Your `ad based` distinction is meaningless. `The whole world` - that is, other people - try to profit from free stuff too. Is something `free` by your definition (god knows there are enough definitions of Free to keep us going for a while now) only involve benefactors with deep pockets funding a project indefinitely, at a loss? How many of those exist? Even there, you'd hardly be exempt from copyright infringement etc - it just wouldn't happen in an attempt to make a profit, but for kicks. There are no adds on Wikipedia but I've seen plenty of abuse there - lies, fake deaths, stupid pictures inserted into maths pages etc.
Hopefully information from Wikipedia will end up on Know as well as in many other places, so that different approaches to protecting facts and filtering nonsense can be tried.
What is the purpose of your diatribe? It's free for the user. If I need information, I can gather it for free: Whether or not there's ads on the page does not limit the amount of data I can gather, nor does it decrease the amount of money in my wallet.
This makes me wonder if highschool teachers will allow the use of this as a resource for school papers. Since most of the time schools forbid students from using wikipedia as a source for any information. Since this has the google name on it which is probably the number one thing they use for finding information for research, I wonder if this will be acceptable. Something makes me doubt it will but it would be nice if they were open to the idea of it.
Wikipedia fails for one simple reason; most of the data is without citation and most of the data with citation relies on web links that do not work anymore. The documentation that IS correct has absolutely no attribution and to find out who wrote an article or various portions of it you need to delve into histories or use something like they use to prove that the government is using it for propaganda or companies are removing swathes of information that are disparaging by the IP blocks they're posted from.
Being able to sort information by far better categories (not just an encyclopaedia) and enforcing attribution means the scrupulous among us will be able to publish data on the knowledge base and get the credit for it, and be able to be *congratulated or better yet, corrected* on it.
With Wikipedia, if you don't like what someone wrote, you delete it. You change it. You add insults. Then you can't use any of the data from Wikipedia anywhere else because it's GFDL. The information is *so* free the only place you can read it is ON Wikipedia, or has spidered Wikipedia and presented the data verbatim on another site.. if Google allows authors to select their license themselves (be it a CC variant, GFDL or a true copyright with a restrictive clause) then this will only draw people in.
There is something wrong about trying to free information by putting it under a restrictive, blanket license. Not all content can be licensed the same way. Wikipedia is high maintenance - looking for citations, constant review by editors, vandalism watches, locking, even selecting for the front page..
As for the advertising, even Wikipedia needs to earn it's keep. To be honest I really really object to trying to read an encyclopedia entry and being told that the WikiMedia conference is going to be on a certain date, taking up 1/4 of my screen at the top of the page, or that I need to donate to the cause. Fuck that. I want to turn that damn advert off. I don't care about it. But, it's essential to keep the site going. You can't complain about it, because without impressing it onto people that they need to pay for the upkeep of the service, they won't.
So, how is this any different to advertising using Google down the side? Well, it isn't. Google needs to make money by selling advertising and authors should be given the opportunity to earn money for all the effort they put in, because after all, spending a couple of days writing a 10 page article on something is an action most people would like to be paid for even just a little.
It's a nice idea in theory. It's all in terms of 'human knowledge.' If I could get a best-of-breed encyclopedia/"Geeky Guide to (insert favorite show/TV/franchise/mythology here" then I'm down. I'll wiki things that I know are relevant to a topic of interest (Movies, a new programming language, what have you). But if I want to find something a little more niche' like if I want to find some new information or recall something of importance on a less then global scale (I.E. following the Lost Experience ARG or iLoveBees a while back), I'll either google it and look for a fan-site wiki (ala LostPedia). I think it could work. If on the GLAT, one of their answers includes death by grue, I'd like to think they can include topics that aren't furthering the development of the human race. I, for one, welcome our information gathering Google-Lords... if they get the right policy down.
But I don't want them searching there.
Jenny's got a new number! 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I can see it now: people will just insert stubs (or copy articles from other sources) for subjects that are likely to be popular search terms, for the sole purpose of reaping the ad revenues.
Also, will we see a new form of "typo squatting", where people create articles with titles like "Slahsdot", linking to the correct article but again generating ad revenue? Meh. (Or worse, the typo page comes up like the real, incorrect slahsdot url with the words I loathe most on any web page "sponsored links", or "popular searches", and a bunch of link spam).
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
My oh my the stupidity that sometimes lies here. Don't feed the trolls, but sometimes they need it ramming down their throat.
"someone's wallet is definitely losing money when the only thing they were looking for in the first place was information."
YES. THE ADVERTISER IS SPENDING THIS MONEY... except they're generally not 'LOSING MONEY', as the purpose of advertising is to promote your product for less money than you will get back from the increased consumer base and sales as a result of the advertising.
The viewers don't pay. That's the point. I can go to this site once or 10000 times and it will not cost me a penny aside from my usual internet access fees. I DON'T PAY. It is a FREE SERVICE to the end user.
Advertising in -pedias is a contentious issue and I'm not sure I agree wholeheartedly with it, but for gods sake, stop spreading such bullshit which is entirely false.
I'd just like to add - in no way is anyone OBLIGED to buy a product from the adverts. There is such thing as free will. If you spend money on an advertised product you see on a billboard on the way to work on the train, it does not mean that train journey cost you more money.
*head explodes with frustration at stupid comments*
Sometimes I think that Wikipedia and now Knol are just reinventing the World Wide Web. They're hosting pages that anybody can post and edit. Each page has some information and links to other pages. But they are providing at least one useful service, limiting which pages and changes are visible.
Wikipedia controls changes at the word level. Any nontrivial article is a compilation from many writers, some of which may be feuding over the content. This is like an open source software project where anybody can edit the source and you must rely on some benevolent wizards to keep the whole cohesive.
Knol controls changes at the article level and seems to be more like typical open source projects. Anybody can send changes to the maintainer who decides which make it into the mainstream release. Of course somebody could fork the project, but unless the fork is a real improvement over the original it won't attract attention.
Overall Wikipedia's model is probably faster and Knol's is more stable if Google can keep it organized. Knol would also have the big advantage of actually being citable.
What's to stop a few people from plagiarising (directly or indirectly) a bunch of articles on the most popular subjects as soon as this service opens?
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
At risk of stating the obvious, this won't get anywhere near as popular as Wikipedia because everyone can't edit any article (thereby keeping the articles up-to-date and reaching decisions by consensus so ensuring accuracy)--although I do suspect that Google will be able to develop a better interface--Wikimedia is in desperate need of developers to work on RFEs.
An on-line encyclopedia model where articles are owned has been tried many times before by the likes of ODP/DMoz spin-off, the Open Encyclopedia Project, and Slashdot spin-off, Everything2. In fact, nearly all the online encyclopedias except Wikipedia have some kind of article ownership even if in some cases it isn't absolute (including Wikipedia predecessor, Nupedia, of course, which was abandoned when it was realised how successful the anyone-can-edit model they were trialing was).
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
From the linked article, knol is about highlighting authors, and while (from the article) there may be competing knol pages on the same subject, there is no mention of someone being able to edit someone else's work - only to review or comment on it.
This certainly sounds like a solution to the edit wars that plague WikiPedia (which is useful, but entirely unattractive to write for given how it is run. The visibility of competing knol articles will be determined by their usefulness as reflected by PageRank and would be saboteurs or self-promoters can only try to write a better (PageRank-ed) article - they can't corrupt someone elses work.
There's two ideas here:
1. No charge; you don't have to pay any hard cash.
2. No cost; you bear no burden at all -- money, labor, or attention to ads.
Knol will have no charge, but it won't come at no cost.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Streamline micropayments for the entire humanity and you've won. You've won against Amazon. Wikipedia. PayPal. Pearson Education. And Citygroup.
Honestly, all we need is a "Google Bank" sort of thing, managing microtransactions for everyone on the planet with zero-fuss international transactions. Google actually has the power to handle this.
If they pull through with this add-powered thing it is likely they can move up against Wikipedia in terms of content amount. Add in comments, ratings and suggestions to knol and you have a semi-wikipedia sort of thing that even pays of for the effort of the authors. Not the worst idea if you think of it. It could very well work.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Hmmm. A globally distributed entity that lets you create pages full of information where you control your own content and can link to other people's stuff... There's an idea. But gee, it sounds so familiar. Where have I heard that idea before?
On the one hand, it looks like a simple land grab of the Internet. People are already doing precisely this thing--we call them web sites. But they aren't enough in Google's control, so one might argue this is a simple move to give them greater access and control and ownership of all the world's content.
On the other hand, there are some evolutionary inevitabilities of the net which go unresolved and this could be a bid at solving that--I'd say a step toward, but I'd like to see robust competition for the space, not a lemming-like dive for this as if it's all we're getting.
When the web originally came out, there was the hint of micropayments going to authors. That never happened. Portals figured out they could just charge for access and never let the money go to who it was accessing. This turned the economics of the web on its head because people invested money and time and energy in creating master works of all kinds, without being reimbursed in many cases. Some have figured out how to make businesses, but those are rarely content creators. The special skill of knowing something is not the same as the special skill of knowing how to build an enterprise web business. There are many, many writers and artists who make things that are useful yet don't know how to make enough money on it. So maybe this could help.
And there's the other thing: We're all aging. That means that the content producers will start to die, and their works, the things people depend on, will go away. Archive.org will rescue some of that, but in its present form, that's not a robust solution. This would at least address the survivability issue.
I would consider this at least something of a success not if Google gets a lot of content, but if good authors felt they could just sit down and create content and expect to be reimbursed for it in a way that fed their family, let them go on vacations, paid their medical bills, and allowed them to retire. If it's just dribs and drabs of pennies, it's doing nothing for society and everything for Google and it still doesn't solve anything.
Then again, there's a big risk that it will bias all writing toward an advertising model, making our world even more driven by "fashion" and less by "substance" than it already is. I'm not sure that's good.
And it's endowing a single entity with a lot of power over the world. I'd like to see other serious entrants in this space to keep the competition (if there can even be any) honest.
Right now it just sounds like the Internet all over again, but with Google's Terms of Service.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Much more importantly, this is going to be owned by Google. They're highly unlikely to let everyone download their article database in the way that wikipedia does. Publically created information on the scale of wikipedia should not be owned by
private organisations.
Oops, someone may be in trouble... the image on that page is CC licensed for "non-commercial" only.
Yeah, because that's pretty much exactly how blogs work today.
"Two thoughts come to mind" etc...
Wikipedia already exists. Wikis are also open source. Knol is reinventing the wheel to make a proprietary wiki for Goggle to then use to do targeted marketing on each article people look at. They then count the articles people are interested in. They also build up a profile of each and every poster, working out what they are interested in. They most likely will also be able to associate each article viewed, with all google searching from their main site via cookies etc. So they are going to be building up an even greater profile of all users of both google and knol.
So far I'm not seeing a good reason to want to use knol, but I'm seeing many reasons to stay away from knol. Each time I hear the Google "do no harm" PR idea, I'm reminded of the old saying, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". Google is becoming Big Brother. Yet few people seem to be able to see its slowly happening.
I guess most people fail to see its happening, partly as its so many small steps towards that goal and they also fail to see how such detailed knowledge can be used to give ever more power to the ones with that knowledge. knol isn't going to be just an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. knol is going to be a hunny pot, waiting to profile each thing all of us are interested in.
I'm sure I'll get flamed for saying it, but as time goes on, I'm sadly becoming more convinced Big Brother is eventually inevitable. Few people can see its happening and no one is going to really stop what companies like Google are doing, as anyone in power wants the power Google is building for itself. They want a part of that power, so they will not stop it. They will do high profile things to make it look like they are controlling and limiting what companies like Google are doing, but in reality, they will not and cannot stop the extent of data mining that's growing year by year. Yet no one in power would really be stupid enough to want to really stop it growing, as its more power for anyone with access to the profiling data.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
One would assume that, since the author's name is specifically tied to an article (ie non-anonymous) then there will be some minimal degree of accountability for the content. If a real name is required, then you would filter out a lot of the anonymous psuedo-babble. Also, shit articles would, in theory, find themselves at the bottom of the pile.
One thing I don't totally agree with is the sentiment "competition of ideas is a good thing." For conversational, social and political topics this is certainly true, but the same can not be said for ALL subjects. Where science is concerned, for example, not all "ideas" have the same value.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out. Regardless, I can't see how it could end up WORSE than Wikipedia and it's still as free as anything else (ie ads don't cost the visitor any relevant amount of money)
=Smidge=
YOu missed another one... Wikipedia frequently changes the scope of the articles it carries.
Once it may carry a certain obscure topic, then decide it's too obscure and delete the page. If you're lucky, it may get pushed to a third party "more suited" to carrying such content. Problem is, if the page is deleted, then the link to the third party hosting the information can get lost. Even such things like trivia that might be fun to know get expunged as irrelevant in a "serious reference site". Other such things stay in Wikipedia. (c.f. StrategyWiki inheriting game stuff from Wikibooks, and the webcomic stuff of late).
I like Wikipedia, and it's generally my go-to site for anything I might want to know, but the attempts to enhance some topics while expunging others may mean that there are better sites out there and maybe one's first stop shouldn't be Wikipedia, but Google, in case Wikipedia has removed what you were looking for...
Count me among the people who feel that this is a mistake - speaking as an author, and as a publisher who has worked with hundreds of authors over the years, single authorship and control simply won't work in this sort of a situation. Maintaining content is hugely difficult and time-consuming, and not something that most authors do well (if at all). The beauty of the Wikipedia approach is that anyone who wants can contribute as much or as little as they want, as frequently as they want. If one person loses interest, there's always room for another to take over. There's also an implication in Manber's post that knols will be of high quality because of this authorial ownership. That will be true of some, but the reality of the situation is that most people, even if they are expert in some topic, can't write out their way of the proverbial paper bag. Many won't even have the necessary skills to organize the source material - this stuff isn't nearly as easy as it sounds.
A few other questions: What happens when there are copyright infringement claims against knols that plagiarize content from elsewhere? Will knol authors start by just stealing Wikipedia articles, and will Google act to prevent that? Will Google's policies disallowing specific content for services like Google Groups apply to Google Knol? What happens when a knol author gets busy, becomes bored with a knol, or dies? Will Google be able to argue in international court that it has no oversight over illegal content created using its own service? There's nothing new here, but the bigger the company, the bigger the target.
More in my TidBITS article at: http://db.tidbits.com/article/9360
cheers... -Adam
It sounds identical to the model that Helium is using (multiple articles, single author, ad-based reward). Sounds like it'll be prone to the same problems like you describe.
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
1. copy wikipedia article
2. paste into knol
3. profit!
rinse and repeat
guess which page will rank higher in google?
Because you can't just contribute once to Wikipedia...
In the sample image they show the user is logged in to their Google Account. They also repeat several times the idea of 'highlighting the author.' Similarly, they talk about a revenue-share with writers. You can't send money to 'Anonymous Coward'. This doesn't sound like a one-time posting thing to me.
more of the same on Twitter.