Slashdot Mirror
The Knol Hypothesis
Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton sends in his latest, which begins like this and continues behind the link. "When Google's VP of Engineering announced their proposed Knol project, where users can submit articles on different subjects and share in the AdSense revenue from the article pages, he didn't mention "Wikipedia," but practically everyone else did who blogged about it. Here's what I think will happen, if Knol is implemented according to the plan: Even though it won't technically be a "Wikipedia fork," it will quickly become equivalent to one, with a "gold rush" of users copying content from Wikipedia to Knol articles hoping for a piece of the AdSense dollars. But I submit this will be a good thing, especially if bona fide experts in different fields join the gold rush as well and start signing their names to articles that they've vetted."
First, I've been saying for a while that someone should fork Wikipedia and start assigning "ownership" of articles to credentialed experts where possible, so that an article can be cited as a source that has been vetted by a recognized individual, and to guard against vandalism. Citizendium does something like this, but started from the ground up rather than fork Wikipedia. I argued that they should fork as much as possible from Wikipedia (having experts "bless" the content in the process); the project's official reason for not doing this was that authors are more motivated when starting with a clean slate than when taking over someone else's article. True, we all know the energizing feeling of a clean slate compared to the sluggish feeling of taking over a 50%-completed project with all of its flaws and compromises, but the "energizing feeling" often doesn't make up for the advantages of having 50% of the work already done for you (which is, in a nutshell, the only reason people ever finish 50%-completed projects instead of starting over!).
So could some other Wikipedia fork achieve the same thing? Programmer/blogger and Guardian columnist Seth Finkelstein, a frequent Wikipedia critic, has pointed out that other sites such as http://veropedia.com/ have tried to build a "verified" version of Wikipedia. "But," he writes, "it doesn't work for many reasons:
1) Maintenance
2) Nobody knows the site exists, or uses it.
3) Google will kill the site's ranking, because of "duplicate content"
4) Roughly 99% of Wikipedia's value is the Google-rank it has, and sites trying to copy its content don't have — or get — that Google-rank.
All true. But Knol has a shot at solving all of these problems. #1 should be mitigated if users earn money for maintaining articles — and besides, many articles like "Abraham Lincoln" won't need much maintenance anyway. #2 should not be an issue since it's a Google project. #3 and #4 depend on how Google lists Knol pages in its search results. The VP's blog post says only,
"Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge."
Of course the question on everyone's minds, not answered directly by those sentences, is whether Knol pages will get any special treatment in search rankings. Google would probably be criticized if they manipulated the results outright. But they might achieve the same result indirectly — for example, having a tab across the top of their search results page for "Knol results," along with the tabs for Web, images, and news. Or if Knol results get killed for "duplicate content," Google might (legitimately) consider this a bug and tweak their duplicate-detection algorithm. Thus Knol would have the same advantage in Google that Microsoft's Media Player has on Windows: The operating system doesn't favor Media Player directly, but compatibility problems with Media Player will always get fixed first (while the RealPlayer people have to watch their programs get broken by Windows upgrades). One way or another, it's pretty certain that Knol results are not going to be "unfindable" on Google.
Now, I'm sure Knol will not formally fork Wikipedia. I wouldn't see any problem with them doing that, but it would be too controversial, after the VP announced it without ever mentioning "Wikipedia," and with Google already dealing with speculation that they're only creating Knol to complete with Wikipedia in their own search results. But with users having cash incentives to copy content from Wikipedia, probably most of the content would get replicated very quickly, and I would be surprised if many users didn't start writing scripts to robo-copy as much content from Wikipedia as possible.
Then you get to the point where experts start improving it. If the first couple of entries on "Physics" are just the robo-copied Wikipedia version, "signed" by users that nobody has ever heard of, this is barely an improvement over the unsigned article on Wikipedia itself. But then only one Physics professor in the entire world has to think it's worth their while to read the standard Wikipedia article, make any necessary corrections, and sign their name to it on Knol — and now you have a version that has been vetted by a credentialed expert, increasing its value many times to people who want to cite it as a source, or who want a higher degree of confidence that it's accurate. (Hopefully Knol will allow authors to confirm their e-mail addresses and display them — in an image, presumably, to stop them being scraped by spammers. This will allow professors to prove that they really have faculty .edu addresses and enhance the credibility of their articles, something I suggested for Citizendium.)
So, some criticisms of Wikipedia would not apply to Knol. Author Nick Carr has written of Wikipedia,
"Certainly, it's useful - I regularly consult it to get a quick gloss on a subject. But at a factual level it's unreliable, and the writing is often appalling. I wouldn't depend on it as a source, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to a student writing a research paper."
When I asked if he would recommend Knol for the same purpose, he was more optimistic:
"Probably. Since a Knol would be written by an identifiable person at an identifiable point in time, I don't see why you wouldn't treat it, in doing research, in a similar way that you'd treat, say, an article by that person. Obviously, you'd need to judge the writer's expertise and authority when deciding whether or not to draw on his or her work, which becomes somewhat more problematic where no editorial or peer-review system applies, as in Knol."
This is where I think the value of a professor's .edu e-mail address comes in, which can at least establish a writer's authority in their subject. I asked Seth Finkelstein whether he would recommend Knol in those same circumstances (verified professor's .edu address, etc.), and his take was, "Of course I would, but you loaded the question in a way so as to remove any problem from it." Well, yeah. I just happen to think Knol actually could remove those problems.
Then there was a little-noticed phrase in Google's blog post that suggests another area where Knol could improve over Wikipedia: the inclusion of "how-to-fix-it instructions." Given that people often need how-to instructions a lot more badly than they need encyclopedia articles, it's surprising that there hasn't been an attempt to standardize around a "Wikipedia of how-to's." Perhaps it's because the Web itself actually does pretty well for that — type in the text of some error message, and you'll usually get some hits on support forums where people ran into the same problem. The trouble is that the ranking of search results depends on the popularity of the site, not on whether the thread ended with someone posting a solution to the problem, so you might have to read through a lot of search results to find an answer. And if you're an expert who happens to know how to do or fix something, there's not much incentive for you to post a page about it (even with AdSense ads), because your page will get buried in the search results beneath all the support forums discussing the same question, even if your post is more concise and useful. Some gurus like Dave Taylor and Leo Notenboom have written so many how-to articles that their own sites have risen through the Google rankings, so if they write a how-to article about something, it will get read (which, of course, creates an incentive for them to write more of them). But for a new expert just starting to write how-to articles, it would take a long time to reach that critical mass.
Knol, however, creates an incentive for experts to start posting how-to-fix-it advice and start reaping the rewards right away, since your how-to articles are just as easy to find under a given subject as anyone else's. Your earnings would start out small as you began to write articles, but they would rise in proportion to the number of articles you wrote, and you wouldn't have to slog along writing for no reward like a typical blogger or site creator, hoping to hit "critical mass" some day. You'd find out early on what the reward would be (financial and otherwise) for the work you were doing, and could decide if you wanted to continue.
Actually, the possibility of "instant rewards" does depend on how Knol articles are ranked against each other within a given topic. The Google blog post says, "For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject," and, "Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it." Presumably the top-rated articles on a given topic will be displayed first by default, so I'm making the assumption that good articles really will get sorted to the top. But if there are already 50 articles on some topic, even if you know you can write a better one, how do you know it would rise to the top of the pile? If 10 people rate your article a 9, and all the other articles have been rated by 100 people each and got an average rating of a 7, then yours should still be listed as the highest in terms of average rating. But how do you get even those first 10 people to see your article? You could invite your friends, but then how do you stop anyone from gaming the system by inviting their friends and asking them all to rate their article a 10?
I'd written about this in the context of whether Wikia Search might try to solve these problems by allowing users to vote on search results, if they could prevent people from gaming the system. That was basically just me thinking out loud that something like that would be cool, before Wikia Search announced any specifics, and I haven't heard that Wikia is trying anything like that. But now that Google has stated that they will use voting and ranking systems in Knol, the question is how to reward new authors while preventing cheating. I suggested some ideas in an article about how to stop cheating and vote-buying on digg. One idea was that you could have a section on the page that showed people links to different articles at random, so that users couldn't self-select on what articles were shown to them, and if those randomly selected users followed the links and voted on the articles, count only those votes in determining the true "rating" of an article. (This is what HotOrNot does for people's picture ratings.) Even if few people rated those articles, the ratings that were collected, would be representative of real users, and not the horde of friends that you'd sent to rate your article. If that did not prove popular enough, then you could give authors the option to pay random users to rate their articles — as long as there was no way for authors to tie payment to higher ratings, the ratings would average out to reflect the article quality, and could be used to sort articles based on their actual merits.
So, I'd like to think that someone in the Googleplex is reading everything I write, but it's probably just a case where great nerds think alike. I wrote in Feb 07 that I thought Citizendium should allow authors to put their name next to articles, both for the "name up in lights" incentives factor and to enhance the article's credibility, and now Knol is going to do that (not to mention throwing in money as well). The same month I wrote that someone should build a search engine that groups together user-submitted articles under different topics, and provides a means for newly submitted articles to rise through the ranks as a result of user votes, and it sounds like Knol will attempt that too. Then in April 07 I wrote about the ways that you could prevent cheating in such a system, and even though Knol hasn't talked about what they will do to address that problem, they're almost certainly thinking about it, and have probably come up with some of the same ideas.
So let's do a test to find out if Google is reading these articles. There's one area where Wikipedia would beat Knol, and that is that everything on Wikipedia can be redistributed for free. That's something really special, and it's the one part of the Wikipedia hype that I actually buy into. I don't really care that Wikipedia articles were created as part of a "worldwide collaborative effort" unless that helps to achieve the goal of being useful. But Wikipedia, for all its flaws, represents the first time in human history that we have a compendium of a huge amount of human knowledge that can be copied freely, that literally belongs to the world, and because it's duplicated in so many places, it can literally never be taken away. That part of the hype really is true, and is quite heady when you think about it.
Google Knol has not declared this as one of their goals; a Knol article might not be freely distributable. When a proprietary project is hosted on a private site, there's always the risk that the company will pull the plug on it. They probably won't pull off the content offline, but they might shut the service down to stop new content from being added, the way Google did with Google Answers. Yes, Knol authors will retain ownership of their writings, so they could try to regroup and continue the project somewhere else, but it would be a huge mess to try and contact all of the authors and get their permission to copy all of their articles to the new location. As currently planned, Knol doesn't "belong the world," and Google never promised not to take it away.
So, I think that Google Knol should include a feature whereby authors can flag their articles as being freely distributable under the same terms as Wikipedia articles. (Any author who copied an article from Wikipedia and submitted it, would be required to set this flag, because under the terms of "copyleft", you can't copy something that's freely copyable and then try to stop others from copying it!) Then a user who wanted a copylefted, freely distributable article, could limit their search to articles that have this flag set. This would give Knol the best of both worlds: if the author of the top-ranked article did not wish for it to be freely redistributable, then they wouldn't put it on Wikipedia, but they could make it available on Knol, and users could choose either the top-ranked copylefted article or the top-ranked article overall, depending on what they wanted. If the best article on a given subject also happened to be flagged freely distributable, then so much the better.
Maybe the Knol people have had this idea already. But even so, if they end up implementing it, then I'm starting right away on articles about how Google should implement Google Anti-Censorware, Google Site Hijack Prevention, Google Security Compensation, and Google Sergey And Larry Give Bennett Their Airplane.
First, I've been saying for a while that someone should fork Wikipedia and start assigning "ownership" of articles to credentialed experts where possible, so that an article can be cited as a source that has been vetted by a recognized individual, and to guard against vandalism. Citizendium does something like this, but started from the ground up rather than fork Wikipedia. I argued that they should fork as much as possible from Wikipedia (having experts "bless" the content in the process); the project's official reason for not doing this was that authors are more motivated when starting with a clean slate than when taking over someone else's article. True, we all know the energizing feeling of a clean slate compared to the sluggish feeling of taking over a 50%-completed project with all of its flaws and compromises, but the "energizing feeling" often doesn't make up for the advantages of having 50% of the work already done for you (which is, in a nutshell, the only reason people ever finish 50%-completed projects instead of starting over!).
So could some other Wikipedia fork achieve the same thing? Programmer/blogger and Guardian columnist Seth Finkelstein, a frequent Wikipedia critic, has pointed out that other sites such as http://veropedia.com/ have tried to build a "verified" version of Wikipedia. "But," he writes, "it doesn't work for many reasons:
1) Maintenance
2) Nobody knows the site exists, or uses it.
3) Google will kill the site's ranking, because of "duplicate content"
4) Roughly 99% of Wikipedia's value is the Google-rank it has, and sites trying to copy its content don't have — or get — that Google-rank.
All true. But Knol has a shot at solving all of these problems. #1 should be mitigated if users earn money for maintaining articles — and besides, many articles like "Abraham Lincoln" won't need much maintenance anyway. #2 should not be an issue since it's a Google project. #3 and #4 depend on how Google lists Knol pages in its search results. The VP's blog post says only,
"Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge."
Of course the question on everyone's minds, not answered directly by those sentences, is whether Knol pages will get any special treatment in search rankings. Google would probably be criticized if they manipulated the results outright. But they might achieve the same result indirectly — for example, having a tab across the top of their search results page for "Knol results," along with the tabs for Web, images, and news. Or if Knol results get killed for "duplicate content," Google might (legitimately) consider this a bug and tweak their duplicate-detection algorithm. Thus Knol would have the same advantage in Google that Microsoft's Media Player has on Windows: The operating system doesn't favor Media Player directly, but compatibility problems with Media Player will always get fixed first (while the RealPlayer people have to watch their programs get broken by Windows upgrades). One way or another, it's pretty certain that Knol results are not going to be "unfindable" on Google.
Now, I'm sure Knol will not formally fork Wikipedia. I wouldn't see any problem with them doing that, but it would be too controversial, after the VP announced it without ever mentioning "Wikipedia," and with Google already dealing with speculation that they're only creating Knol to complete with Wikipedia in their own search results. But with users having cash incentives to copy content from Wikipedia, probably most of the content would get replicated very quickly, and I would be surprised if many users didn't start writing scripts to robo-copy as much content from Wikipedia as possible.
Then you get to the point where experts start improving it. If the first couple of entries on "Physics" are just the robo-copied Wikipedia version, "signed" by users that nobody has ever heard of, this is barely an improvement over the unsigned article on Wikipedia itself. But then only one Physics professor in the entire world has to think it's worth their while to read the standard Wikipedia article, make any necessary corrections, and sign their name to it on Knol — and now you have a version that has been vetted by a credentialed expert, increasing its value many times to people who want to cite it as a source, or who want a higher degree of confidence that it's accurate. (Hopefully Knol will allow authors to confirm their e-mail addresses and display them — in an image, presumably, to stop them being scraped by spammers. This will allow professors to prove that they really have faculty .edu addresses and enhance the credibility of their articles, something I suggested for Citizendium.)
So, some criticisms of Wikipedia would not apply to Knol. Author Nick Carr has written of Wikipedia,
"Certainly, it's useful - I regularly consult it to get a quick gloss on a subject. But at a factual level it's unreliable, and the writing is often appalling. I wouldn't depend on it as a source, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to a student writing a research paper."
When I asked if he would recommend Knol for the same purpose, he was more optimistic:
"Probably. Since a Knol would be written by an identifiable person at an identifiable point in time, I don't see why you wouldn't treat it, in doing research, in a similar way that you'd treat, say, an article by that person. Obviously, you'd need to judge the writer's expertise and authority when deciding whether or not to draw on his or her work, which becomes somewhat more problematic where no editorial or peer-review system applies, as in Knol."
This is where I think the value of a professor's .edu e-mail address comes in, which can at least establish a writer's authority in their subject. I asked Seth Finkelstein whether he would recommend Knol in those same circumstances (verified professor's .edu address, etc.), and his take was, "Of course I would, but you loaded the question in a way so as to remove any problem from it." Well, yeah. I just happen to think Knol actually could remove those problems.
Then there was a little-noticed phrase in Google's blog post that suggests another area where Knol could improve over Wikipedia: the inclusion of "how-to-fix-it instructions." Given that people often need how-to instructions a lot more badly than they need encyclopedia articles, it's surprising that there hasn't been an attempt to standardize around a "Wikipedia of how-to's." Perhaps it's because the Web itself actually does pretty well for that — type in the text of some error message, and you'll usually get some hits on support forums where people ran into the same problem. The trouble is that the ranking of search results depends on the popularity of the site, not on whether the thread ended with someone posting a solution to the problem, so you might have to read through a lot of search results to find an answer. And if you're an expert who happens to know how to do or fix something, there's not much incentive for you to post a page about it (even with AdSense ads), because your page will get buried in the search results beneath all the support forums discussing the same question, even if your post is more concise and useful. Some gurus like Dave Taylor and Leo Notenboom have written so many how-to articles that their own sites have risen through the Google rankings, so if they write a how-to article about something, it will get read (which, of course, creates an incentive for them to write more of them). But for a new expert just starting to write how-to articles, it would take a long time to reach that critical mass.
Knol, however, creates an incentive for experts to start posting how-to-fix-it advice and start reaping the rewards right away, since your how-to articles are just as easy to find under a given subject as anyone else's. Your earnings would start out small as you began to write articles, but they would rise in proportion to the number of articles you wrote, and you wouldn't have to slog along writing for no reward like a typical blogger or site creator, hoping to hit "critical mass" some day. You'd find out early on what the reward would be (financial and otherwise) for the work you were doing, and could decide if you wanted to continue.
Actually, the possibility of "instant rewards" does depend on how Knol articles are ranked against each other within a given topic. The Google blog post says, "For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject," and, "Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it." Presumably the top-rated articles on a given topic will be displayed first by default, so I'm making the assumption that good articles really will get sorted to the top. But if there are already 50 articles on some topic, even if you know you can write a better one, how do you know it would rise to the top of the pile? If 10 people rate your article a 9, and all the other articles have been rated by 100 people each and got an average rating of a 7, then yours should still be listed as the highest in terms of average rating. But how do you get even those first 10 people to see your article? You could invite your friends, but then how do you stop anyone from gaming the system by inviting their friends and asking them all to rate their article a 10?
I'd written about this in the context of whether Wikia Search might try to solve these problems by allowing users to vote on search results, if they could prevent people from gaming the system. That was basically just me thinking out loud that something like that would be cool, before Wikia Search announced any specifics, and I haven't heard that Wikia is trying anything like that. But now that Google has stated that they will use voting and ranking systems in Knol, the question is how to reward new authors while preventing cheating. I suggested some ideas in an article about how to stop cheating and vote-buying on digg. One idea was that you could have a section on the page that showed people links to different articles at random, so that users couldn't self-select on what articles were shown to them, and if those randomly selected users followed the links and voted on the articles, count only those votes in determining the true "rating" of an article. (This is what HotOrNot does for people's picture ratings.) Even if few people rated those articles, the ratings that were collected, would be representative of real users, and not the horde of friends that you'd sent to rate your article. If that did not prove popular enough, then you could give authors the option to pay random users to rate their articles — as long as there was no way for authors to tie payment to higher ratings, the ratings would average out to reflect the article quality, and could be used to sort articles based on their actual merits.
So, I'd like to think that someone in the Googleplex is reading everything I write, but it's probably just a case where great nerds think alike. I wrote in Feb 07 that I thought Citizendium should allow authors to put their name next to articles, both for the "name up in lights" incentives factor and to enhance the article's credibility, and now Knol is going to do that (not to mention throwing in money as well). The same month I wrote that someone should build a search engine that groups together user-submitted articles under different topics, and provides a means for newly submitted articles to rise through the ranks as a result of user votes, and it sounds like Knol will attempt that too. Then in April 07 I wrote about the ways that you could prevent cheating in such a system, and even though Knol hasn't talked about what they will do to address that problem, they're almost certainly thinking about it, and have probably come up with some of the same ideas.
So let's do a test to find out if Google is reading these articles. There's one area where Wikipedia would beat Knol, and that is that everything on Wikipedia can be redistributed for free. That's something really special, and it's the one part of the Wikipedia hype that I actually buy into. I don't really care that Wikipedia articles were created as part of a "worldwide collaborative effort" unless that helps to achieve the goal of being useful. But Wikipedia, for all its flaws, represents the first time in human history that we have a compendium of a huge amount of human knowledge that can be copied freely, that literally belongs to the world, and because it's duplicated in so many places, it can literally never be taken away. That part of the hype really is true, and is quite heady when you think about it.
Google Knol has not declared this as one of their goals; a Knol article might not be freely distributable. When a proprietary project is hosted on a private site, there's always the risk that the company will pull the plug on it. They probably won't pull off the content offline, but they might shut the service down to stop new content from being added, the way Google did with Google Answers. Yes, Knol authors will retain ownership of their writings, so they could try to regroup and continue the project somewhere else, but it would be a huge mess to try and contact all of the authors and get their permission to copy all of their articles to the new location. As currently planned, Knol doesn't "belong the world," and Google never promised not to take it away.
So, I think that Google Knol should include a feature whereby authors can flag their articles as being freely distributable under the same terms as Wikipedia articles. (Any author who copied an article from Wikipedia and submitted it, would be required to set this flag, because under the terms of "copyleft", you can't copy something that's freely copyable and then try to stop others from copying it!) Then a user who wanted a copylefted, freely distributable article, could limit their search to articles that have this flag set. This would give Knol the best of both worlds: if the author of the top-ranked article did not wish for it to be freely redistributable, then they wouldn't put it on Wikipedia, but they could make it available on Knol, and users could choose either the top-ranked copylefted article or the top-ranked article overall, depending on what they wanted. If the best article on a given subject also happened to be flagged freely distributable, then so much the better.
Maybe the Knol people have had this idea already. But even so, if they end up implementing it, then I'm starting right away on articles about how Google should implement Google Anti-Censorware, Google Site Hijack Prevention, Google Security Compensation, and Google Sergey And Larry Give Bennett Their Airplane.
So you just explained that people will want to use the site because they'll get money? And they'll stop at nothing to do that? You don't ... say. You should call Google and tell them this, I'm sure they never realized this!
Copying other's work is what the Internet is all about anyways, right?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
You may copy and distribute the Document in any medium, either commercially or noncommercially, provided that this License, the copyright notices, and the license notice saying this License applies to the Document are reproduced in all copies, and that you add no other conditions whatsoever to those of this License. You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute. However, you may accept compensation in exchange for copies. If you distribute a large enough number of copies you must also follow the conditions in section 3.
You may also lend copies, under the same conditions stated above, and you may publicly display copies. Regards,
Website Hosting
I'm sorry to state the truth and offend everyone, but Wikipedia is mostly plagiarized from better sources in that kind of grad-student BS where you use synonyms but rewrite the same sentences, use the same paragraph order, same concepts and introductions, etc.
Anyone can copy Wikipedia, but like the GPL, the result remains open. So anything copied from Wikipedia into Knol, and anything derived therefrom, remains freely copyable, regardless of any terms Google may seek to impose..
People will start edit the content for it being very attractive in some sense. Sensational claims, spicy personal details about personalities, etc...
The whole Web is now such a Wikipedia, where people give content and try to earn money for people visiting. The only thing left is to mark certain pages on the Internet as "definition" page on particular subject and voila.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
They will now!
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
all college students, faculty and staff had .edu addresses, as do many other indidivuals that work for places like Hospitals or Doctors offices that are actually owned by a university. Just in the town I work for there are 3 colleges, and two hospitals that are owned by one of those colleges. That's literally thousands of people with .edu email addresses that are not professors.
Not in the concept of having another competitor (good), but that Google's search results will increasing become Google products and NOT actually what's around the web.
This is already slowly happening and I find the increasing number of spots taken up by Google in the search results to be particularly bad for their brand, search results, and image.
I would definitely not like to see a search result on "jumping beans" filled with 1x Google Image Search, 2x Youtube/Google Videos, 2x Google Knol, 1x Google Products, 2x Google News, 2x Google Base.
There are way too many news items on this (and every other) news site about fascinating, exciting or terrible things that MIGHT happen. Maybe. If the stars are right.
Isn't news supposed to be about what DID happen, or inevitably WILL happen?
And if you distill this significantly smaller portion of the news down to that which is actually relevant to the reader...that is, things that may truly affect them that they am not already keenly aware of (no point in telling someone about the rain if they're already wet)...then I think the news could be neatly summed up over dinner on one of those little slips of paper found in a fortune cookie.
In fact, that would be a good place for this news.
just called, and want their plagiarism-for-profit business model back.
Of course there will be people who try to get away with verbatim copies of Wikipedia articles, but I think that's not going to be the mainstream. There is a generation of students who have perfected the art of rephrasing available content so that it is no longer recognizable as plagiarism. Encyclopedias are about facts, and facts are not copyrighted. Take a Wikipedia article, extract the facts into a list, write an article from that list. In effect, Knol is nothing else than Google paying chump change for a Wikipedia rewrite to circumvent the open license.
I think a better approach would be atomicize knowledge (e.g. "Hugh Hefner shaved his beard on 02/10/08"), make that source a verifiable resource attributable to individual users and then attribute adsense payouts dependent on page counts for ($num_verified_references - $num_unsubstantiated_rumours). You could then retain the successful wiki model for article construction but with greater trust for the facts contained. But then I, sadly, don't work for Google and I'm probably missing something significant.
Slashdot:
Slashdot is very cool, pretty, and fun.
Please send add revenue to --Commander Taco
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
For those who have read the book Snow Crash, which i would recommend, this sounds a lot like the information brokerage system there. Everyone uploads useful data and then people who use it pay money, except the people paying money are the advertisers targetting the people using the data.
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
I sincerely hope that people will not copy Wikipedia articles. A lot of WP articles have been copied from websites (or textbooks). In traditional publishing, this would be a serious transgression - but in WP lets it slide. The advantage that WP has in this regard is that its authors are anonymous - they can not be prosecuted for copyright infringement. People writing on Knol would however need to take copyright laws and libel laws into consideration.
So for original work, who would have the copyright for Knol? What would stop Google from taking the work and start charging access fees etc. I'm not saying they would, but it would be good to understand what kind of licence(s) would exist on the material, and who maintains the copyright on work.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I don't think it will fly because it provides incentive for abuse. Some people will want to make a business off the adsense revenue. At best Google can only move reactively to maximize customer revenues through providing maximal value. However for people interested in profit, the system will be explored to give maximum customer revenue through providing minimal value. Bring on the arms race with the spam and hired guns to rate it up. Wikipedia isn't that bad an idea.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
The official policy of Wikipedia is that copying material from copyrighted sources is copyright infringement, and the offending material should be quickly removed. I've seen an entire article deleted outright because of such an infraction. If you see copyright infringement in Wikipedia, follow the directions about dealing with copyright violations. If you've seen copyright violations on Wikipedia, and you have not followed those instructions, it would be more appropriate to say that you have let it slide. Don't blame it on someone else, as you don't know if anyone else has noticed the violation.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
This is actually a highly interesting topic, but to enhance his future income as a knol-writer, could someone please introduce Mr. Haselton to the concepts of "concision" and "brevity?" The number of people who read these posts decreases exponentially with the length of the post.
I hope wikipedia get shafted, the editors are all a bunch of cunts. Er, wait...
The only interesting thing about Knol is that it is a new low in Google's continuing brand dilution. Although Google has already spewed out an incoherent product mix, they had previously still retained at least this minor degree of focus: we index and monetize content; we do not create content With Knol, the final clear line in making Google a distinct brand is fuzzed. They don't create content, well, sorta, maybe, they "manage" the creation of content. Of course, you could argue this line was already crossed when they went into the blogging business.
Google now has a full-blown case of the Microsoft Business Disaster Model. This model goes like this:
The most profitable company this year was Exxon-Mobil. A company that has to get its hands dirty and actually move a physical product had higher profits than Microsoft, a company that just thinks up bits that it then distributes, largely electronically. Imagine the profits if Microsoft were to sell off all its huge money losers, retain only enough employees to maintain Windows and Office, and pay out all the profits as dividends. It would be the most incredible stock the market had ever seen.
There's already a Wikipedia fork which focuses on expert opinion and reliability - Citizendium.
Doesn't have the big "Google" name behind it, and not very many articles, but for all I care, it's Wikipedia done right. Ever since the deletionism and notability nazis have taken over Wikipedia, I'm kind of disillusioned about it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
> The license for wikipedia content is similar to the BSD code license in that you can't add any new restrictions on the content. What do you think the odds are of google letting that fly?
You mean the GPL-like, actually. The BSD is often called 'more free' because you can add restrictions, though they can always just grab the original and ignore you. The GPL's restrictions are all about preventing the person getting the code from using it to restrict anyone else.
A German publisher tried to make books from Wikipedia articles. They identified commited Wikipedians, who collected Wikipedia articles and tried to improve them until the quality was sufficient to be printed. Professional editors supported the Wikipedians. After a few volumes the project was abadoned. It was way too much work to maintain and verify the Wikipedia articles, to find a common structure and diction.
Is this knol of the grassy type?
Rather like the situation at Zeal.com, when they got bought over. Suddenly reams of entries that volunteers had spent a lot of time working on were pulled for apparently spurious reasons - for example, a site that gave incredibly useful information on growing tomatoes hydroponically was pulled because of a jokey throwaway line at the end of one page to the effect of "Of course, all these techniques also apply to cannabis plants." The reason for pulling the site was that "It encouraged illegal activities", but they never actually made clear what legal jurisdiction they were basing the arbitrary rulings on. We (the established volunteers) speculated it was US law, as the servers were based in the US, but as they had gone out of their way to recruit volunteers from around the world (I'm in Scotland) suddenly we found our work being deleted because the pages we linked to described infringements of a legal system we had no experience of.
Sorry, that sounds a bit like sour grapes - I guess that years on I'm still a bit pissed off about it. After a month or so of the "new regime" I quit as a volunteer. But the point I'm trying to make is that any "proprietary" system can change the rules unilaterally and pull content without any reference to the existing userbase; in such a proprietary system there is absolutely no guarantee of content existing "forever".
Most of this argument is based on the idea that some expert automatically makes an article more accurate. This just isn't the case. An article on physics isn't more accurate just because some physics professor said it was. Its more accurate because it has valid arguments and has references that support its contentions. Carl Sagan, (and I understand the irony of citing an expert to invalidate the idea of experts) called this type of argument "argument from authority" and included it in his baloney detection kit. No one is above having to explain their reasoning. This ability to do so is in fact what defines an expert.
It will either be the "experts-exchange.com" version of wikipedia, or it will be abandoned.
The whole source of wikipedia's success, and the rise of the internet in general, has been that the unwashed masses write surprisingly good articles on personal hygiene. I used the web when mosiac was the only browser, and it sucked. It was like a being able to access the library's card catalog from your dorm room -- not that useful unless you were a college student. The cool part of the internet was all in usenet, which suffered in spades all the problems that people thing need fixing in Wikipedia today.
Wikipedia hurts itself more than anonymity and trolling hurt it. It is well documented that Jimmy Wales employs a clubish goon squad of people decided NOT EXPERTS who go through the site locking articles, deleteing accounts, and etc, often based on the most whimsical reasons. I mean, look at what they left on the site -- every cartoon character, bit-player in a soap opera, CD release and band, star trek persona, has a more lengthly write up than many major REAL people in history.
And that's actually ok; but if some person with a cameo role in a fucking comic books gets five pages of text, why do they delete a three sentence description of a real life linux user group in a major city as being not important enough ?
The uncertainty, plagarism, inaccuracies, and edit-wars of the wikipedia actually correctly represent the poor current state of human knowledge and conflict of human opinion. Anything that removes them cannot be more useful, it is less useful.
If you look at the current state of wikipedia and yearn for something more authoritative and "cleaned up", that just means that deep within your soul a tiny piece of you is still saying it would be a good idea to crawl back to Ellis Island and get back on that boat and go catch rats in the gutters of Europe while awaiting the orders from the castle and edicts from the church. You are a peasant. And you can't go back anyway, because all the remaining places in the world with places for your kind are starving, like North Korea.
Get the fuck over fixing wikipedia already.
Sounds like Knol is trying to be a less sucky About.com rather than a new Wikipedia. But the question is will spammers abuse it?
Your perspective, though depressing and "realistic", does not allow for grokking what Google is really doing.
I mean Google has been really innovative (if I may take such a dirty word in my mouth) and gone further than *any* online company: Google Search, GMail (now up to 6 GB of storage and counting), AdWords, AdSense. These may be called the "core bussiness" and are wildly successful and innovative. However, Google are still researching lots of other options, which are also taking off: Google Calendar, Google Images, Google Videos (mostly a buyout of YouTube, but still it has the potential to win since it includes more results), Google Maps (including Local Bussiness search which integrates with ordinary searches now and Google Maps. As a website-owner I think its brilliant!), Google News, Google Checkout, Google Base etc.. etc There are TONs of betas and free "products" from Google which in fact can be used, both to promote your website, products, and to index more of the "web" (whatever it is).
Yes, it is dilluted and very diverse, and yes, only the core bussiness makes money. However, many of these areas are value-adding on the core bussiness, and I have to confess, they are brilliant in getting people beta-test their offerings, which are usually of fine quality as far as "betas" go.
Whenever I ponder on an online product, it is with Google I am checking out first. Its sense of quality, simplicity, low-cost and availability / flexibility (POP/IMAP for Gmail for instance), is astounding in most areas they have offerings. Given, the UI is often pretty spartan and unintuitive, when you get used to it, it REALLY WORKS and usually has something more to offer than their competitors. It is built for smart people, not catering to the stupid and dumbing things down to the lowest denominator.
Instead of the much malignant PayPal, I would *love* to be able to use Google Checkout (which is ad-driven and free), but sadly it is only available in USA & UK at the moment. You see how this is going? In the future, it will happen. You check it out.. (pun intended) They make sure their offerings are *both* technically superior and have a higher usability, without blocked accounts and general hassle on the phone. They do everything to avoid that. The algorithms will make your heaven or hell in search results, but when you fix your website, it comes "clean" pretty quick (if you know what youre doing). So it empowers its *users*, by making such consistent and well-thought out algorithms. They dont punish you, and leave you in the dirt. They make sure there is an electronic path back to salvation..
I see all this research as long-term investments. I see Google pioneering new waves like free wireless internet for all in the future, just because they have the visions and the balls to do it. I see them mostly as a good thing which will further growth and explorations of what computing can do for us.
And usually, I end up starting using/offering one of their products to my clients/friends, for free! A tiny bit of their offerings, and mostly I dont use their offerings for my everyday chores, but they still creep in because theyre so darn good for users and websites etc. Even though my stance is to provide my own software as much as possible, sometimes its just not worth it (email-server for users - uggh, no way!).
So to grok Google, you have to understand they offer what they offer to the alpha-geeks first, so that *they* will promote whatever they deem fit to the more ignorant unwashed masses. The people behind Google has understood how technology is spread among people, and have no desire to make grandma start using Google Analytics or anything too complicated for her. But they make it darn accessible for the geeks, who will promote their stuff further. Since most of it is free and very low-cost, there is not that much they lose on offering betas, and trying to tweak out the best stuff over time.
Google is more research than anything else, since nobody really knows how computing will
This needs to be tagged "grassyknol". :P
It is naive to think that simply appending an email with .edu will somehow lend credibility to your text. First of all there must be millions of people with email addresses like that who aren't accredited in any way. Secondly, .edu corresponds to education institutions in the United States. There are probably more experts in general who don't have .edu email addresses than there are those that do. What the author is reaching for is an open, international accreditation data bank. Your official credentials, your C.V., what ever might be useful to establish why you are significant, could be stored there, in public, for interested parties to examine. What I think is also likely, or even more likely, to happen is that chains of signed certificates will grow and support an individual's credentials. Ultimately we'll all rely on authority houses to vet individuals and assign value to their credentials. This will happen especially where people will want credit for something that might not be public. I'm sure that both of these ideas can be expanded upon (indeed I am sure that they have already been expanded upon by many others more qualified than myself) but for the sake of brevity...
there's simply not enough money in it to make it worth anyones time. the more specialized and academic a topic, the less likely it is to be read. AdSense doesn't address issues of supply and demand. no one but a select few will be able to make a living off of things like this because teh internets provide a virtual infinite supply for all data sources, no matter how high or low demand is. not that academics make a fortune off their troubles, but chances are, if you're having to go through Springer Verlag to find expert information, you're paying through the nose for a very small book.
Those restrictions don't achieve much since you have your own copyright on additions and modifications to the text, and you can impose your own restrictions on those. The practical effect is the same, since people can't copy the page in its entirety anymore and since nobody can tell which part is original and which part has been added. The only way to avoid that limitation is to add a GPL-like clause that extends the license to additions and modifications.
Wikipedia is much worse for Google than a popular site in search results that doesn't use AdSense. Increasingly users will bypass Google search to go directly to Wikipedia. In both Firefox and Opera Mini 4 on my phone, I set up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s quick searches; so I can jump directly to the Wikipedia article on any unfamiliar topic or acronym like 'w Tub girl'. I find I use it as much as Google search. The refrain "justfuckinggoogleit.com" is being replaced with "read the damn Wikipedia article first", and that is hugely threatening to Google.
What will kill Knol is spammers. If one person can copy a Wikipedia article into a knol, a thousand spammers will, each inserting a single link to another pointless web page in their endless halls of mirrors. Already, Googling for a relatively popular phrase like 'Katana driver download' brings up matches from garbled splogs[**] on blogspot.com.
[**] Don't google for 'splog', use your quick search bookmarklet
=S
nuff said
OK, a broken business model that based on begging for money every 6 months or so.
... Gazillions good ideas come to mind. But no money means no money for good ideas. And Wikipedia will stay vulnerable to attacks from someone with money.
Go for advertising. Buy out books to the public domain, give back some money to wikepedia authors (e.g. give money to proven authors for writing additional articles),
Yes yes, money changes people. Articles may get flawed to get more money. If you think, Wikipedia must stay independent, make it independent. Create a Wikipedia-Ad-foundation, that tries to get as much money as possible, but give them absolutly no control over Wikipedia-The-Content-Organisation. Both orgs should be absolutly independent.
And so you'd have a lot of money *and* complete seperation of concerns.
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel