Google's Knol, Expert Wiki, Goes Live

Brian Jordan and other readers sent in word that Google has taken the wraps off Knol, its expert-written challenger to Wikipedia. (We discussed Knol when it was announced last year.) Wired has an in-depth look. Knol's distinctions from Wikipedia are that authors are identified by their real names (and verified), and that they can share in ad revenue if they choose to. The service initially features a lot of medical articles, which is interesting considering that Medipedia also launched today. This medical wiki is backed by Harvard's and Stanford's medical schools.

Comments

Losing Anonymity?

[snowgirl]

Part of contributing to Wikipedia is that you're anonymous... would you really want someone to know that despite being a huge football fan, you also knew about My Little Pony?

I like the "anonymity" on Wikipedia, and I don't think this Knol can measure up, simply because of that reason.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[chris_mahan]

The other thing I think will become a problem is when Expert A writes an article on Subject X, then Expert B says, hey, Subject X is missing information Z, and Export A says no way, and Expert B can't write Subject X, but will write Subject AlmostX, and then you end up with two articles on Subject X. In wikipedia, the two articles would be merged. Knol is gonna have a big synthesis problem.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[SomeJoel]

You should write the algebra entry.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Paralizer]

What the hell is wrong with My Little Pony? I thought that was a /. favorite.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Sockatume]

On the other hand, this is rather more transparent. When Expert X and Expert Y are putting out mutually contradictory versions of events, then the reader must critically evaluate them both. If it turns out that Y uses shoddy references and mostly cites his own work, while X has a wide-ranging and substantial reference base to build his article on, then it's clear that X is the one to trust, and Google gets to stay out of it.

By contrast, on Wikipedia, Author X's content will dominate the article while Author Y gets into a massive edit war, is banned, and runs off to spin some yarn to The Register about how he's persecuted by The Cabal. Then Wikipedia's image is tarnished.


(TINC)

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Sockatume]

Basically what I'm saying is, the former should be less demanding of readers' critical thinking skills, and therefore more likely to be accepted as a source.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[snowgirl]

By contrast, on Wikipedia, Author X's content will dominate the article while Author Y gets into a massive edit war, is banned, and runs off to spin some yarn to The Register about how he's persecuted by The Cabal. Then Wikipedia's image is tarnished.

At least Wikipedia has good information then. I don't see the problem.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[sick_soul]

I agree, and in addition there is currently
no context when creating a new article.
It's maybe just too soon, but the process seems
to make it more difficult to reach critical mass.

I wanted to start writing something, but
desisted, because I found no contextual information.

On wikipedia I would read some article, see a
dangling link with no page associated, and create
one from there. Or read an existing one, and
just add additional information, or correct
some detail.

Otherwise it is hard to just start writing
general, context-free articles about
"what I know". Maybe they should have started
with wikipedia content, applying the new process
for further edits and new articles, in order
to already have a lot of context already.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Sockatume]

It's not a problem for readers, but you can see why it's attractive for a company like Google. They could never put out a Wikipedia for fear of being seen as The Enemy by people who think the moon landings are fake or that cellphones are making the bees return to their home planet.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[blind biker]

would you really want someone to know that despite being a huge football fan, you also knew about My Little Pony?

I don't see why would I mind. I am a complex person, with very disparate interests and abilities, and I don't mind at all if people know it.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[falconwolf]

I like the "anonymity" on Wikipedia, and I don't think this Knol can measure up, simply because of that reason.

With Wiki you don't know if the author knows anything about the subject whereas with Knol you can see the author's qualifications.

Falcon

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[JCSoRocks]

ZOMGPONIES!!!

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[atari2600]

Excellent point - the reason that Google has Knol out is the reason they have Image Labeler out. Create content (for Google) / test Google's software for free while enjoying Google's "free" offerings.

I can see Knol as being beneficial from the perspective of selling my own goods (free advertising) but it's not really a replacement for Wikipedia and I don't think Google wants/intends Knol to replace Wikipedia. Knol is about sharing expertise and I don't see a reason why Wikipedia and Knol can co-exist in harmony.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[snowgirl]

I like the "anonymity" on Wikipedia, and I don't think this Knol can measure up, simply because of that reason.

With Wiki you don't know if the author knows anything about the subject whereas with Knol you can see the author's qualifications.

Right, but why rely upon ethos for evaluating the correctness of an article? Are we really going to jump into the fallacy of appeal to authority so quickly?

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[strawberryutopia]

It's not a problem for readers, but you can see why it's attractive for a company like Google. They could never put out a Wikipedia for fear of being seen as The Enemy by people who think the moon landings are fake or that cellphones are making the bees return to their home planet.

Cellphones? I thought it was the Daleks.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[master5o1]

I see that A has been exported, so maybe you can write/edit it now :)

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[chris_mahan]

As a long-time wikipedia administrator (who're been fairly inactive of late because of my 3 year-old's constant request for my time--and rightly so) I readily understand the point you convey.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, browsing very briefly through knol, it seems more like about.com than wikipedia.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[hostyle]

Or the entry for Knol-it-all

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Anonymous Coward]

its more like Y with an axe to grind will win the edit war and X will go off and sulk while the article gets more crap inserted into it by wiki edit nazis having quotas to fill.
have you

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[ZombieRoboNinja]

This actually reminds me somewhat of academic publishing. One expert writes an article, and if it's a worthwhile article that gets attention and another expert has views that differ significantly, they can write a counterpoint.

The nice part about this new system is that the ORIGINAL article can be revised immediately. If the first author is intellectually honest, they'll take any criticisms into account and revise what they've written where they find it appropriate, and maybe add links to the counterpoint article. So ideally, you'd get a nice network of interrelated expert opinions that you could compare and contrast on their merits, rather than Wikipedia's studied "neutrality" that often ends up hurting as much as it helps.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[j01123]

You should write the algebra entry.

No way, he improperly uses upper-case letters for variables. I'll write the "algebra" entry using "x" and "y" and he can write an "Algebra" entry using "X" and "Y".

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Koiu Lpoi]

Dude, what's with the oddly placed line breaks? Does your web browser not do word-wrap on text boxes, and are you on a screen only a few hundred pixels across? If you'd have put line breaks in where you instead put double breaks, your currently 17(+3 blank lines) comment is a whopping 5 on my screen.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[DragonWriter]

The other thing I think will become a problem is when Expert A writes an article on Subject X, then Expert B says, hey, Subject X is missing information Z, and Export A says no way, and Expert B can't write Subject X, but will write Subject AlmostX

Why can't Expert B write Subject X? There is explicitly no prohibition on topic duplication, and no (that I can find) prohibition on title duplication.

In wikipedia, the two articles would be merged. Knol is gonna have a big synthesis problem.

Knol is not a work. Knol is place for people to put works (and to collaborate on them if they chose). Wikipedia is a collaborative work.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[snowgirl]

Right... that's why Conservapedia got started, because all those people with the religious right-wing nutso axes to grind found Wikipedia such a hospitable environment...

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[snowgirl]

In fact, browsing very briefly through knol, it seems more like about.com than wikipedia.

Half of about.com seems to be an immediately copied version of wikipedia. I found one article that was pretty much exactly word for word, changed the text slightly, and POW! there's my change on about.com.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Anonymous Coward]

having inserted a completely fake article into wikipedia and having had it edited multiple times with even more crap and having it last for over 4 years before some uber admin figured out the article was a steaming heap of garbage from the beginning, its a lot easier to get a biased piece of crap into wikipedia than you think.
subtle errors can be put into wikipedia more easily than you think. and are extremely hard to catch after 50-60 people have edited it.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Anonymous Coward]

haha, well played

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, consider how Wikipedia must have started...

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[snowgirl]

having inserted a completely fake article into wikipedia and having had it edited multiple times with even more crap and having it last for over 4 years before some uber admin figured out the article was a steaming heap of garbage from the beginning, its a lot easier to get a biased piece of crap into wikipedia than you think.
subtle errors can be put into wikipedia more easily than you think. and are extremely hard to catch after 50-60 people have edited it.

The same can be said for any encyclopedia, or "trusted" source of information. See: "Steinlaus" :)

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Relax. It's just his poetry.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Text wants to be free, yo.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[ksd1337]

Hey, this is Slashdot. You're supposed to get excited when someone even mentions ponies (or Natalie Portman, for that matter.) I take pride in knowing about ponies.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[daniel_newton]

If they are all creative commons then they can merge the parts they like.. or someone else can merge the best parts of both

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Anonymous Coward]

thats not the point. the point is blatant misinformation can make it into wikipedia while not into a real encyclopedia and get added to as people figure its crap and add more to it. e.g. see liberettia ..still on wikibin. its a variant of liberty city from GTA and lasted quite a while on wikipedia before a geography expert from the usgs caught it. chances are that guy will eventually get sick of taking out the garbage and move to knol. which is why wiki is fucked in the long run. experts dont like taking out the trash.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Appear to Authority is only a fallacy in arguments when it becomes something like "I have a degree, so therefore I am correct." Going to the right "authority" for information isn't a fallacy. Do you go to a bum on the street to get your appendix out? Why not?

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then why cram it into such a narrow tube?

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you go to a bum on the street to get your appendix out? Why not?

Because it would be unfair to allow the bum to risk imprisonment just because I have appendicitis.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, what's with the oddly placed line breaks?

MODE CO40

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Galactic Dominator]

Nothing about that scenario guarantees X > Y in accuracy or even that it's accurate at all. More like Colbert's truthyness where if enough people accept it, then it's true.

That's a problem in my book. Don't get me wrong, I love the wiki, but the grassy knol has a better vantage point.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[KGIII]

Oh come on mods, that was at least funny if not even more than funny. Mods... *sighs* Made me think of the "Exterminate, exterminate" bit but well, I'll avoid bad puns and silly references just this once.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Anonymous Coward]

By contrast, on Wikipedia, Author X's content will dominate the article while Author Y gets into a massive edit war, is banned, and runs off to spin some yarn to The Register about how he's persecuted by The Cabal. Then Wikipedia's image is tarnished.

At least Wikipedia has good information then. I don't see the problem.

I don't see the assumption that the struggle described above produces 'good information' is supported in any way.
 
One of the times I was Author Y, though I left rather than get into a tiresome edit war, it was Author X who was in the wrong. The articles in question ended up strongly slanted towards his political beliefs, though the slant was not obvious to the non expert, and simple facts were distorted towards this end, though again, not obvious to non experts. It's only years later, now that Author Y has become bored and moved on, that the articles in question are being cleaned up by Author Z. I can here the Wikipedia cheerleaders now - 'but the process works! the article is being fixed!'... Which is true, for now. There are many folks of Author X's ilk out there and only a few of mine and Author Z's. What happens when Author Z moves on?
 
Another time I was Author Y, Author X had written an article using popular websites and popular reference works as his sources, all which contain substantial misinformation. (Not maliciously mind you, merely the subject is esoteric even among those studying the wider related field.) Along I come and haul out my professional references and start correcting the article - I was nearly banned over that one because 'he could prove his sources with a Google Search' and I could not. Along we come years later when Wikipedia allows, nay makes a fetish of, footnotes and sources... And the article is carefully footnoted to those popular websites and popular books. Once again, along I come and try to fix the article with careful footnotes to the proper reference works... And again my work is in vain because the reference works I use are scarce and expensive - while the ones he uses can be found on the shelf at Barnes and Noble, and match what can be found on the web.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[KGIII]

Given the longevity of about.com and wikipedia.com are you sure that it isn't the reverse?

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[ralphbecket]

Author Y's name wouldn't be an anagram of Cilliam Wonnolly, would it? :-)

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Haoie]

Hardly. Your IP is logged in history of changes to articles anyway.

You may as well get an account, if you're going to do some real editing.

And not vandalism!!

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[blahplusplus]

"When Expert X and Expert Y are putting out mutually contradictory versions of events, then the reader must critically evaluate them both"

*Dons tin foil hat for a moment*

Unfortunately this can be abused willy nilly for information the government or other rich people/businesses don't want you to know, or to use experts to omit, skew or smear information since the people with money control what is "credible" and what is "not", experts in my opinion are over-rated, history has shown many experts to be competent enough to do their jobs, but not that competent after the have died and a generation or two down the line gets to look back at their incompetence that wasn't recognized, because many experts can hide their ignorance behind other peoples ignorance, "credibility" or status.

Eisenhower's Farewell address, 1961:

"Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present--and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

It is the task of statesmanship to mould, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society."

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[uhlume]

You're assuming, as it seems does Wikipedia, that mergers and "synthesis" should be the end goals of any useful repository of information. I'm not so sure I always want "the wisdom of the crowd" to do that for me. Given a contentious subject (or, for that matter, a disagreement between a recognized authority and an opinionated amateur) I'd rather have multiple viewpoints fully represented than a homogenized "neutral" synthesis in which it's difficult to determine where one point of view ends and another begins, or who derived the synthesis. Given conflicting sources of information, I'm more than capable of performing my own synthesis — and at least I know where my own biases lie.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Serious Callers Only]

Part of contributing to Wikipedia is that you're anonymous...

This is also the biggest problem with wikipedia, and a good reason never to trust anything you find there. There have been several scandals on wikipedia of information being modified by interested parties - I would link to wikipedia, but I don't think they have a page about that.

In future most knowledge databases will be attributed, like Knol, because that leads to accountability, which leads to accuracy.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Anonymous Coward]

He used iPhone.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[sean4u]

no context when creating a new article.

A friend recently started Dummipedia and is experiencing the same issue, I think. Dummipedia's angle is 'a Wikipedia companion', where articles must be no more than 500 words in length. A visitor can get the gist on some subject, and if they want all of what millions of editors know, there's a 'more...' link on every article to Wikipedia.

It's slow starting - like you said, the articles are small islands in a big empty index. I suggested a button on empty pages like "Get me started by scraping 500 words from Wikipedia", but he didn't like it. Maybe it was the word 'scrape'. Or maybe it's not just programmers who like to 'roll their own'.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Regarding your sig - if you knew anything about Electronic Music, you would not call it electronica. That is something coined by the big label marketing execs to explain something they could not understand.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Anonymous Coward]

iphone?

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[jambox]

Author Y gets into a massive edit war, is banned, and runs off to spin some yarn to The Register about how he's persecuted by The Cabal.

I heard the Register is run by an even more sinister cabal of knowledge hoarders.

Seriously though, there have been a number of... how to put it... "veracity scares" associated with wiki over the years. Let's try different systems.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[caluml]

That's a hilarious site. I hope no-one takes it seriously.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[dkf]

which is why wiki is fucked in the long run. experts dont like taking out the trash.

You have a citation for that, or does it represent original research? (In my experience, some people like being wikignomes and others don't; it seems orthogonal to subject expertise. YMMV.)

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[jambox]

I disagree. The synthesis should accommodate both views, if and only if both are supportable by references. There are many areas of academia where different experts have different views on a subject. This is played out through the publishing of peer-reviewed research papers and eventually one is shown to be correct. In the meantime, encyclopaedias can only report the facts of the disagreement. You are correct that Wikipedia shouldn't take sides, but that doesn't prevent synthesis and should never require two articles.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[jacoplane]

We do love ponies on /.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Khalid]

That means you deliberately have a bad intention, ie. spreading fake information. By my long experience (4 years of WP editing) I can say that this kind of attitude is rather rare in WP, what Wikipedia suffer most of is crack-pots and spammers, which are easier to catch than subtle misinformation.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Khalid]

You should find what you are looking for here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_wikipedia

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[jambox]

Yes but Wikipedia puts the onus on the reader to check references. No open encyclopaedia can stop people from making malicious edits. Having a name next to a fact would perhaps make it slightly easier to catch wrongness, but it doesn't guarantee anything.

For example, there was the moderately well known case of Ronnie Hazelhurst, who was a theme-music composer for British comedy shows and, because the shows were famous and the tunes extremely memorable (for the most part), quite famous at the time of his passing (last year IIRC). Much was made of how the dick-pop anthem "Reach" by S-Club 7 was attributed to him in several newspaper obituaries. In fact, he had absolutely nothing to do with it and had simply been a victim of a journalistic prank, where someone had cleverly inserted that "fact" into his wiki page, fully intending that exact outcome! This demonstrated that many very well paid journalists just crib everything they write from wikipedia. Clearly, if they had checked the citations on the wiki article for that claim, the rick wouldn't have happened. If there are no citations, don't trust it.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it does not mean that X is the one to trust. It just means that X voices a majority opinion, or maybe just the opinion of the most vocal group.
This is especially the case for sensitive subjects which involve politics and/or religion.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Koiu Lpoi]

OMG, THANK YOU ANONYMOUS! I'm SO GLAD you could tell me that! Oh man, I can't wait to be put into the genre that the indie kids think I am, rather than the big labels. I'm so ready for it. Especially the part about not knowing anything about electronic music. I'm so ready to receive your bad medicine, so I can know as much as you, almighty AC.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Denial93]

This kind of thing would be way easier to pull off on Knol. There, if someone even smells the garbage, all s/he can do is give you a bad rating. This leaves the site online to mislead more people. And the confirmed identification thing is a hurdle, not a barrier, as most of us here should know. It just requires more effort.

Any system can be compromised given sufficient effort. You have invested quite a lot of effort, and probably in an obscure, little-defended place on the Wiki. I'll wager there are peer-reviewed journals that could be duped by this kind of dedicated effort. As you found out, Wikipedia eventually couldn't.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Denial93]

with Knol you can see the author's qualifications.

Sure, but I can't necessarily evaluate them. Say there's an article on "genetic expression" from a professor at an Indian College, which seems reasonable but is outside my area of knowledge. Any of the following could be true:

- his qualifications are bogus, he duped Google's identification process
- he teaches at a diploma mill or other disreputable institution
- he's an expert only on a field that seems related but isn't, say evolutionary studies
- even if he's a geneticist, he may present a fringe theory as factual for personal, religious, etc. reasons
- even if he's a geneticist and unbiased, he may be years behind the curve on current findings

On the Wiki, for all its faults, individual editors cover each other's weaknesses. Knol doesn't have that built-in. Authors do compete with each other, and will presumably react to competing articles by incorporating their ideas, but it will still be harder to evaluate the factual accuracy of the content. Especially because, so far at least, Knol articles have way less references than Wiki ones and rely more on the supposed authority of their authors.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[mdwh2]

So the end result is that Google still has articles from authors X and Y, whilst Wikipedia has an article dominated by X, the one supported by reliable references. How is Google's way better again?

I agree that Y will whine that his shoddy edits got reverted, and the Register will whine about it, but I don't see that's a problem with Wikipedia...

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Kelbear]

I like having both options. I think I'll just go ahead and look in more than 1 place for information. I'll welcome both Knol and Wikipedia as related, but different entities.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Narpak]

Personally I have never been much of a fan of Authority. However I do not see why appealing to authority, on a subject matter, is fallacy. Especially when you can "appeal" to multiple authorities to get a more complex picture. And but that I don't just mean reading different articles on Knol, but also using Wikipedia or any other source of information to gain a greater understanding of the subject. And one of these sources of information can be people, i.e. authorities in their field. Of course automatically assuming that all the person say is gospel would be a failure on our part; just as if the person proclaims that all they say is gospel it would be a failure on their part.

Seeing the author's qualifications can be a very good thing if you are actually doing research, or writing something where you need references a bit more substantial than "read it on wikipedia". Not to mention that you can actually write questions to the person that wrote the article (of course, there is no guarantee that they will answer).

I like Wikipedia, I read Wikipedia often; but I do not explicitly trust Wikipedia. In much the same way I don't really trust any one source in general. But when I read about Knol and Citizendium and other attempts to gather high quality information on the internet I applaud them. Wikipedias ease of use and large database of subject is a tool for many, but I do not think that having only one such service operating at that level is a good thing.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing wrong with appealing to authority. You acquired a majority of your beliefs simply because you believed what somebody told you. I highly doubt you've verified for yourself (through direct observation and/or mathematical proofs) that the Earth orbits the Sun, or that atoms are made up of protons, neutrons and electrons. "Fallacious"!

The fallacy is only committed when one says "Expert X says Y, therefore Y must be true."

An example would be "I heard (from someone I consider an authority) that appealing to authority is always a fallacy, therefore appealing to authority is always a fallacy." In this case you would not only be guilty of committing the fallacy, but would also be just downright incorrect.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Once I finally found Conservapedia's domain I didn't get more than a few pixels into the page before being visually assaulted by a dirty big American flag - what is that supposed to be a sign of trust? Some political statement? A joke?

Next.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[The_reformant]

I'm gonna squat "Alegbra" with an advert to my domain hosting service.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[xappax]

Sure, ultimately you want to be able to analyze the "primary documents" yourself and determine what you think yourself. But that's what the internet at large is for, you don't need a special web site for that. In the same way you don't want to depend on one Wikipedia page, you wouldn't want to depend on knol.google.com for all your sources either, would you? And another thing, Wikipedia has both a "talk" section for each article, and an exhaustive history of edits to the article. Between these two resources, you should be able to hone in on any controversy or differing perspectives the article's authors have, and do all the "synthesizing" you want.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[bartok]

Assuming that everyone is intellectually honest is not a solid foundation.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[snowgirl]

Another time I was Author Y, Author X had written an article using popular websites and popular reference works as his sources, all which contain substantial misinformation. (Not maliciously mind you, merely the subject is esoteric even among those studying the wider related field.) Along I come and haul out my professional references and start correcting the article - I was nearly banned over that one because 'he could prove his sources with a Google Search' and I could not. Along we come years later when Wikipedia allows, nay makes a fetish of, footnotes and sources... And the article is carefully footnoted to those popular websites and popular books. Once again, along I come and try to fix the article with careful footnotes to the proper reference works... And again my work is in vain because the reference works I use are scarce and expensive - while the ones he uses can be found on the shelf at Barnes and Noble, and match what can be found on the web.

Blame the resources not the author. If someone relies upon bad references, then he'll get bad information... guess what's more likely to get out with Knol?

Beating out common-misperception is difficult not just on a wiki, but in life in general. I know a number of areas of knowledge a lot better than the average public, and the public holds opinions and knee-jerk attitudes that are ENTIRELY off base, and disconnected with reality.

However, get a person willing to put his ethos on the line to say that, "The single most common form of marriage in the world is a man and woman", you now have a reference point, and a source... after that more people keep quoting it, all the while the sociologists and anthropologists of the world are going "dude, wtf? it's polygamy that's the most common marriage, not this one man, one woman thing."

That's where I see Knol's problem lying. While wikipedia suffers from general misperception (fortunately, a lot of articles manage to get past the largest amount of misperception) Knol suffers from over reliance on ethos. Who cares who wrote article XY... if the material stands for itself, the qualifications of the individual adding the information don't matter.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[snowgirl]

So the end result is that Google still has articles from authors X and Y, whilst Wikipedia has an article dominated by X, the one supported by reliable references. How is Google's way better again?

I agree that Y will whine that his shoddy edits got reverted, and the Register will whine about it, but I don't see that's a problem with Wikipedia...

Interesting idea... I foresee that people will be whining and complaining that their article is receiving poor ratings because their opponents want to dismiss their arguments. :)

Everything has a problem, and people will always come up with a way to cry about XY when it's not going in their favor.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[snowgirl]

Hardly. Your IP is logged in history of changes to articles anyway.

You may as well get an account, if you're going to do some real editing.

And not vandalism!!

I do have an account, precisely to avoid logging my IP into history logs.

However, my pseudonym is attached to that personality, and I can't use that pseudonym elsewhere unless I wish to link the two ideas together. Guess what? I use at least two pseudonyms. :)

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[snowgirl]

Part of contributing to Wikipedia is that you're anonymous...

This is also the biggest problem with wikipedia, and a good reason never to trust anything you find there. There have been several scandals on wikipedia of information being modified by interested parties - I would link to wikipedia, but I don't think they have a page about that.

In future most knowledge databases will be attributed, like Knol, because that leads to accountability, which leads to accuracy.

The Wisdom of the Crowd. It's why democracy generally works, and it's why if you have 1000 people guess how many jelly beans are in a jar you'll end up with 1000 different answers, whose average actually is likely within 2 or 4 beans of the actual amount.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[snowgirl]

There is nothing wrong with appealing to authority. You acquired a majority of your beliefs simply because you believed what somebody told you. I highly doubt you've verified for yourself (through direct observation and/or mathematical proofs) that the Earth orbits the Sun, or that atoms are made up of protons, neutrons and electrons.

Actually, I have taken the mathematical proof to consider that the Earth orbits the Sun (that or the Sun orbits the Earth, and the other plants follow really SCREWY patterns in space... much simpler to explain as the Earth orbits around the Sun.)

The knowledge that protons neutrons and electrons are involved in atoms is verified by experiments, and results that produce the expected results. This is why I believe in Quantum Tunneling... if it didn't happen, then we wouldn't have these wonderful things we're typing into.

I am actually a skeptic of all incoming information, and if you bothered to look up Einstein's history, you would find that be was the same way. I presume that all new information is false if it conflicts with my model of the world. Once such information is validated to me, I adapt my model of the world, and continue on. I allow no information in that is contradictory or contrary to earlier information unless it can be shown that my earlier information were incorrect or incomplete.

Example, one of my friends told me about scientists using very powerful magnets to levitate plastic die, and even a living frog. I scoffed at the idea, and dismissed it, noting that neither contains any ferrous material to allow it to be levitated by magnetic force. He pointed out to me that all atoms have dipole moments, and that even non-ferrous materials, when exposed to sufficiently strong magnetic fields will results in dipole moments lining up more often than not, and produce a living frog that responds to magnetic fields.

Next example, I was watch Mythbusters, the plane on a conveyor belt. My first reaction was "it doesn't matter what the ground speed it, it matters what the airspeed is... if the plane isn't moving, then it won't take off." Once they did experiments to show it did, I noted, "my information was incomplete. The airspeed is the thing that matters, not ground speed, that's correct. But the plane pushes AIR not the ground, and so it is able to accelerate and take off regardless of the motion of the ground below it." :) If you're not a skeptic, and you don't critically analyze all information, then you're implicitly relying upon the fallacy of appeal to authority.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[falconwolf]

Right, but why rely upon ethos for evaluating the correctness of an article? Are we really going to jump into the fallacy of appeal to authority so quickly?

If I know someone know about the subject I know it's probably will be more correct than if I know nothing about the author. As for falling for authority, I've always questioned authority. Actually when I was in the military that got me into a lot of trouble.

Falcon

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[rtb61]

Ah, but googlite expert A says to many people are starting to use wikipedia as a first search point and this represents a threat to revenue and a blackhole in their user thoughts probing and recording databases.

Personally if I wanted to combine advertising with an encyclopaedia, I would simply talk it over with the wikipedia people so that wikipedia articles could be embedded in my site with local search, in a non-editing format, with my advertising in return for some sponsorship to wikipedia, why re-invent the wheel, some companies simply just can't think outside of their teeny tiny cubicle.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

The point is anyone who wants some free propaganda and have idiots trust that information can just get it into wikipedia.

That's obviously what author's reputations are there to protect. Integrity.

Wikipedia is full of crap, propaganda and even blatant lies (I'm sure you've noticed creationist crap poppping up again and again in biology sections already. Mostly some turkish ip)

And it's loads worse in the localized versions.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[snowgirl]

The point is anyone who wants some free propaganda and have idiots trust that information can just get it into wikipedia.

That's obviously what author's reputations are there to protect. Integrity.

Wikipedia is full of crap, propaganda and even blatant lies (I'm sure you've noticed creationist crap poppping up again and again in biology sections already. Mostly some turkish ip)

And it's loads worse in the localized versions.

Will it be any better with Knol? You end up with a half-dozen crackpots rating each other's articles up in order to get creationism to come out on top, not to mention, I imagine that Google will eventually offer "premium articles" where you can pay them USD $x in exchange for a higher ranking.

Being in a peer-reviewed journal, as well as being a peer-reviewed journal itself is not enough to lend credibility anymore. Creationists have their own peer-reviewed journal, and when that journal competes with evolution on Knol, who will win?

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

But at least you ALSO get a coherent version uninfected by creationist idiots (apparently there's a harun yahya cultish type thing big in Turkey atm)

In wikipedia you just get, well, infected articles. I can't seem to find a better term.

Most people are utterly incapable and unqualified to write wikipedia articles. And they have this huge ego at the top who'll "fix it all". Riiight.

Re:Losing Anonymity?

[chris_mahan]

You can absolutely do that. A lot of sites do already. Just keep adhere to the lgpl and you're good.

Online Resources

[Narpak]

I think it is good that there is competition in this field. Perhaps the two services can even come to complement each other, or at least provide a good database of information based on different principles. At the very least it should force both to do their best to provide a good easy interface and information that is as far as is possible; verified.

Re:Online Resources

[Anonymous Coward]

Except when the sources are bad. Take this knol article, for instance

http://knol.google.com/k/hunter-handsfield/safe-sex/nAi5F17X/WdH0tg#

This safe sex page doesn't even mention that going into IT can ensure a 100% avoidance of STDS. And they call themselves experts!

Re:Online Resources

[Klaus_1250]

There already are competitors: http://en.citizendium.org/ and http://uncyclopedia.org/. The latter may be a bit less useful as Wikipedia, but it is a lot more fun.

Re:Online Resources

[nbauman]

Except when the sources are bad. Take this knol article, for instance

http://knol.google.com/k/hunter-handsfield/safe-sex/nAi5F17X/WdH0tg#

This safe sex page doesn't even mention that going into IT can ensure a 100% avoidance of STDS. And they call themselves experts!

That's interesting. H. Hunter Handsfield is one of the top experts on STDs in the U.S. I have a textbook with his chapters, and I heard him give a lecture on STDs at a National Institutes of Health conference. That conference was not a good place to pick up girls.

He's also the author of the famous color atlas of STDs, which is another good way to discourage activities which lead to STDs.

The New Scientist reported on a conference in London in which participants tried out different pickup lines and evaluated the results.

The worst pickup line of all: "I have a PhD in computer science."

So you are correct in that respect.

Re:Online Resources

[TheLink]

'The worst pickup line of all: "I have a PhD in computer science."'

I can think of far worse pickup lines.

No wonder I'm still single ;).

No I do not have one of those terrible STDs. Me getting STDs would be like being taxed on lottery winnings without having managed to buy a lottery ticket.

Re:Online Resources

[cashman73]

Umm, I wouldn't call Uncyclopedia a "competitor". It's owned by Wikia, which is essentially Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales' for-profit wiki venture.

Re:Online Resources

[KGIII]

"Hi, I spend my free time on slashdot. I guess a blow job is out of the question?" -- I'm going with that being the worst I can think of right now but let us hope that this idea doesn't pick up speed.

Re:Online Resources

[Zwicky]

A couple of classics:

"Hey there, great legs. What time do they open?"
"I'm going to have you tonight. So you may as well be there."

(I'll get my coat).

Re:Online Resources

[TheLink]

"Hi, your place, or my mom's basement (next to my beowulf cluster)?"

You only need to say the line in the brackets if she's not already run away after you finished saying "basement".

Re:Online Resources

[Anonymous Coward]

I cant believe that anyone has made a joke about his name.. I mean HANDSfield, hunter... safe sex. Hello!

Re:Online Resources

[tehcyder]

Umm, I wouldn't call Uncyclopedia a "competitor". It's owned by Wikia, which is essentially Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales' for-profit wiki venture

How on earth does Uncyclopedia make any profit?

Wikipedia ^ ~Wikipedia

[Metasquares]

It's like Wikipedia but without the open collaboration which made Wikipedia successful.

Re:Wikipedia ^ ~Wikipedia

[elgaard]

It is also a Wikipedia without database dumps.

Even if much of the material will be under a creative-commons, no one but Google can control Knol in the future.
So no forks.

Re:Wikipedia ^ ~Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you remember google answers? You paid an expert to find you answeres. That didn't work either. Not only that, Google can falsify information it chooses to.

There's no way a lab of 50 people, is going to be able to out-research, and be more accurate than 50 million people.

Re:Wikipedia ^ ~Wikipedia

[PylonHead]

Yeah, I get the feeling that this is going to be Yahoo vs Google in search world, except this time Google is the Yahoo.

For the complete ClusterF!!! that Wikipedia is, it's got some fascinating information. The articles I read on Knol were frankly shallow by comparison.

It does seem to be skewed towards medical articles, and there might be advantages to having experts write up medical entries.

I'm sure the Google's lawyers quake when they think of someone typing "epileptic seizure" into Google, getting the Wikipedia entry, and some joker has added advice to smear yogurt over the victims nipples.

Re:Wikipedia ^ ~Wikipedia

[DragonWriter]

It's like Wikipedia but without the open collaboration which made Wikipedia successful.

Well, except that -- at the author's discretion -- "knols" can either use open, moderated, or closed collaboration, so its not "without open collaboration".

Re:Wikipedia ^ ~Wikipedia

[zullnero]

It's like Wikipedia but without the open collaboration which made Wikipedia successful.

Wikipedia with optional ads, too. Whatever is in Knol, will most likely already be in Wikipedia without intrusive ads. I, as the regular user, will stick with Wikipedia, thank you. It's the same reason why I'll use craigslist instead of my newspaper's online classifieds, too.

Re:Wikipedia ^ ~Wikipedia

[fabs64]

= 0xFFFF?

Re:Wikipedia ^ ~Wikipedia

[AllIGotWasThisNick]

It's like Wikipedia

The Wikipedia comparison seems to be a red herring. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Knol would appear to be a Knowledge Management System. They related, of course, but one is not the same as the other.

Re:Wikipedia ^ ~Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

...smear yogurt over the victims nipples.

Ooooh, that works for seizures too?

Re:Wikipedia ^ ~Wikipedia

[happyemoticon]

It's like Wikipedia but without the open collaboration which made Wikipedia successful.

It's also a Wikipedia without editors. And I mean real editors, the kind of people who turn the gibberish that some brilliant professors reduce their prose to after they get tenure and stop giving a shit into something resembling standard formal English. It's a Wikipedia that's oblivious to the fact that many "experts" can't (to give a totally contrived example that is obviously not drawn from my work experience) be trusted to write an obituary for someone they've known for 40 years without flagrant spelling errors and grammar so fast and loose you'd swear it was some blonde Hollywood starlet going commando to a discoteca.

Re:Wikipedia ^ ~Wikipedia

[thermian]

no fork perhaps, but clones of the service may appear.

Re:Wikipedia ^ ~Wikipedia

[DerekLyons]

It's like Wikipedia but without the open collaboration which made Wikipedia successful.

It's also a Wikipedia without editors. And I mean real editors, the kind of people who turn the gibberish that some brilliant professors reduce their prose to after they get tenure and stop giving a shit into something resembling standard formal English.

Yes, by and large the editors do a wonderful job of creating something that 'resembles' standard formal English. Sometimes the resemblance is weak, sometimes average, but its (almost) always there.
 
Seriously, have you even actually read Wikipedia? The average article is full of convoluted sentences, odd paragraph structure, etc. etc. (Leaving aside the poor structure of the overall article.) Your much vaunted editors don't do that good of a job.

Re:Wikipedia ^ ~Wikipedia

[mounthood]

Even if much of the material will be under a creative-commons, no one but Google can control Knol in the future.
So no forks.

Worse, we can't easily reuse it because of Attribution. At lease the few articles I looked at all had CC+Attribution.

blah

[nomadic]

Oh, please, like we're supposed to believe them because of all their fancy degrees and significant experience in the field?

Citizendium?

[commodoresloat]

Why duplicate the efforts of Citizendium? Are knol's goals substantially different?

Re:Citizendium?

[Sockatume]

I believe that Knol articles are all single-author, while Citizendium is basically Wikipedia with mandatory editor registration.

Re:Citizendium?

[bledri]

I hadn't seen Citizendium before, that looks interesting.

I think the two projects have differing philosophies and goals although there is some overlap. I think that Knol is "less wiki-like", more a collection of expert (and amateur) articles that allows for author controlled collaboration. Citizendium seems to be like a classic collaborative wiki with stronger authentication and editing policies.

Of course I could be completely wrong. I'm suppose to be debugging not surfing. Doh!

Re:Citizendium?

[wile_e_wonka]

I think the one-author model is problematic. Citizendium's Wikipedia-like collaberative model keeps bias in check. For example, what if Michael Behe, a biochemist, decided to write the article on "Evolution." He controls the content? It seems that it will be very difficult under any sort of one author model to get an unbiased article on just about any sensitive topic. When any approved "expert" can alter any article, however, there will be concessions to satisfy authors disagreeing on what should go in an article, ending up with a largely unbiased and very information piece. Much like many Wikipedia articles have turned out.

I also have somewhat of a problem with keeping non-experts out altogether. The experts like to write stuff, but they don't necessarily want to punctuate properly, or cite every little detail, or link to new articles as they come up, or format an article just so, etc. There any many non-experts who troll through Wikipedia looking for grammatical errors, places to add better citations, places to add [citation needed], etc. It seems that non-experts should be given some level of control in order to allow them to do what the experts aren't likely to do as much.

Re:Citizendium?

[greenreaper]

If he writes an article on evolution, others are welcome to write their own, and review his.

Re:Citizendium?

[wile_e_wonka]

If he writes an article on evolution

That's something I don't understand. So, Knol plans to allow multiple articles on one topic? That sounds potentially confusing. So it will be less like an excyclopedia and more like a collection of essays with some degree of suggested editing allowed? It seems to me that the discription of being like Wikipedia is not quite correct--the average Wikipedia user is looking for one article regarding the topic typed in to the search box. I can see the benefits of having several competing articles/essays on a given topic, but I could also imagine many people saying "huh? Why did I get 5 results? Whatever, I'll just see what Citizendium or Wikipedia says."

Hmmm....

[arizwebfoot]

Went to Medipedia.com and it says they don't launch until the end of 2008

Not bad, but it's missing something

[Reality Master 201]

Wikipedia definitely suffers from the problem of having a lot of know nothing jackasses writing articles, random defacements, and a lot of useless crap.

But Knol seems to be missing the best part of wikipedia - extensive internal links. Half the fun of wikipedia is looking up something, then wasting a couple hours wandering through topics till you get someplace you might not have gone otherwise.

Re:Not bad, but it's missing something

[techno-vampire]

Half the fun of wikipedia is looking up something, then wasting a couple hours wandering through topics till you get someplace you might not have gone otherwise.

And that, of course, is also the fun of looking up something in a dead-tree encyclopedia. As you look up the article you need, you run across other interesting articles and end up learning all sorts of unexpected things.

Re:Not bad, but it's missing something

[geekoid]

Actually, most of the articles are very good informative, and accurate.

There ahve been some studies regard the accuracy of the sci3ence stuff, and it was more accurate then the Encyclopedia Britannica

Wikipedia a very solid. Nothing else, it's a good starting place.
No source should be a sole source of data for a paper.

Re:Not bad, but it's missing something

[geekoid]

Except it is a lot easier and wider with hyperlinks.

Re:Not bad, but it's missing something

[JCSoRocks]

Wikipedia definitely suffers from the problem of having a lot of know nothing jackasses writing articles, random defacements, and a lot of useless crap.

So it's like slashdot then?

Re:Not bad, but it's missing something

[Random BedHead Ed]

Amen, brotha. I love surfing Wikipedia, and even fixing other people's bad writing. And as much as Wikipedia has its problems, I don't see that Knol offers much over it. Its articles aren't encyclopedic, but are more like standalone magazine articles. They also aren't guaranteed to improve over time with new information, something that would happen if new verified experts were to come in and edit existing articles. That happens all the time on Wikipedia (if you care to substitute "unqualified hacks" for "new verified experts"), but I don't see a community forming around Knol in the same way.

On the other hand, the articles themselves look quite good. In a way, what they've created is really an online magazine, like Wired or Ars Technica, but with no core subject matter. Because of this, and because of its style, I don't see people flocking to it. But Knols will appear in search results, and that's bound to send traffic to it.

Re:Not bad, but it's missing something

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but Knol is going to end up with the know nothing jackasses writing articles. They're already there. I've seen several articles written by professional writers and not by someone who is actually a professional in the field.

Reading what Knol is all about, it's nothing more than a glorified blogging platform.

"So what subjects can I write on?
(Almost) anything you like. You pick the subject and write it the way you see fit. We don't edit knols nor do we try to enforce any particular viewpoint â" your knol should be written as you want it to be written."

How is that any different than any random jackass having their own pointless blog?

Well I'm off to Knol to write about Quantum Oil Lubricators then I'm going to write an article about George Washington and his relation to the KKK, because any random jackass can write about anything.

Seriously, how fucking stupid.

Re:Not bad, but it's missing something

[pgillan]

And that, of course, is also the fun of looking up something in a dead-tree encyclopedia. As you look up the article you need, you run across other interesting articles and end up learning all sorts of unexpected things.

In a dead-tree encyclopedia, sure, I might look up information about the Serengeti, and then learn all kinds of interesting things about spiders, shoelaces, and salmonella, but with Wikipedia I can learn about things that start with other letters.

Re:Not bad, but it's missing something

[Foolicious]

Slashdot definitely suffers from the problem of having a lot of know nothing jackasses writing articles, random defacements, and a lot of useless crap.

There...fixed that for you.

Re:Not bad, but it's missing something

[Crazyswedishguy]

Half the fun of wikipedia is looking up something, then wasting a couple hours wandering through topics till you get someplace you might not have gone otherwise.

.. which lead to a very cool project, posted on /. a few months ago:
The slashdot article: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
The project itself: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

I had some fun messing around with this... very cool. If you're too lazy to click the links above, essentially it lets you calculate the lowest number of links between two Wikipedia articles! Awesome.

Did you know you could get from the article on Hitler to that on Diarrhea with only 2 mouse clicks?

Re:Not bad, but it's missing something

[nomadic]

Wikipedia definitely suffers from the problem of having a lot of know nothing jackasses writing articles, random defacements, and a lot of useless crap.

I don't mind, I'm used to that. I've been reading slashdot for 10 years.

Re:Not bad, but it's missing something

[Anonymous Coward]

someone mod this insightful!

Re:Not bad, but it's missing something

[andphi]

ObComic: http://xkcd.com/214/

Re:Not bad, but it's missing something

[Foolicious]

Redundant?! Off-topic, definitely. But redundant? Pick your negative mods more carefully.

More of a blog than an encyclopedia

[aembleton]

I've only really looked at this article, which was the most prominently featured on their front page. Reading the first few paragraphs it comes across as one persons view and experiences as opposed to an encyclopaedia. Some work will need to be done on this if it is to be a serious challenger to Wikipedia.

Re:More of a blog than an encyclopedia

[bledri]

That's funny that the featured article you read seemed like a blog, because one of the tips for writing a knol is:

* Don't write a blog. Knols are meant to be standalone articles on a topic of your choosing. Knol is not optimized for diary-type writing.

I skimmed a couple of the medical articles and they actually seemed extremely well done and complete. It will be interesting if this goes anywhere or just becomes a centralized place for self-promoting blow hards on the 'net.

Re:More of a blog than an encyclopedia

[ancientt]

Funny. At least I hope you intended it to be funny. I'm not sure though if your choice of article or their feature on it to be so prominent is funnier.

I instead looked over lung cancer and toilet clogs, and I found it to be much closer to reading encyclopedia entries than wikipedia. I'm torn, on the one hand I see this as a great way to categorize knowledge, having wikipedia as a wide but non-authoritative source of knowledge and knol as an authoritative one would have them complement each other rather than compete with each other. On the other hand, I fear that people will choose to contribute to only one rather than both, thus stalling the momentum of wikipedia (further) and slowing the contribution rate.

On the third hand, I wonder if knol will considered a valid reference source for writing. It would be great to have such an online source if it can eventually have even a quarter of the submissions.

I'd also like to ponder whether wikipedia could do tiered levels of authority, having authors whose submissions are given more weight than the general submissions and if by doing so they could combine the knowledge systems, having content shared between systems and allowing users to use whichever interface they would prefer. I'd like to ponder it, but I ran out of hands.

Re:More of a blog than an encyclopedia

[Sockatume]

This just went up: "Film Review: L'homme Sans Tete example. This review was written for a National Film School production workshop." I get the feeling they're not really screening for content all that much. Thousands of chunks of small blog- or magazine-style content is not going to make for a good reference site.

Re:More of a blog than an encyclopedia

[Eq 7-2521]

I read the article as well, but question his authority on the subject. While convenient, stoves are certainly not essential in all areas at all times. On the other hand, Bourbon is, which he fails to mention at all.

Re:More of a blog than an encyclopedia

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting Anonymously so I don't negate my moderation...

I'm not worried about this. Most of the hardcore contributors to Wikipedia are not academics or prominent experts. They're just highly motivated amateurs. The two demographics don't overlap because academics usually want attribution for the content they write (it is, after all, their profession to pass on knowledge) and academics have little patience for engaging in edit wars or undertaking the lengthy process of being socialized into the Wikipedia community.

Insofar as these Knol articles will be written by experts with attribution, I think that this will complement Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a hard time getting easy access to scholarly-level sources. Most people won't go to a library to research their topic, and few have access to JSTOR or EBSCOHOST or other journal databases. Knols will be a low barrier way for academics to write something that is easily accessible and quickly publishable, while Wikipedians will be able to access and cite Knols with far greater ease than other more traditional sources.

One way to think about this project is simply Google attempting to fill in the logistics chain between accumulated primary source knowledge -> published secondary source knowledge, and -> online tertiary source knowledge. Since Wikipedians are disallowed from "original research", synthesizing primary source knowledge is out of the question. It's access to authoritative secondary sources that's most necessary to Wikipedia, and Knol seems to be an effort toward filling that gap.

Re:More of a blog than an encyclopedia

[aembleton]

I've now read through the Lung Cancer article and it is very well written. Perhaps Wikipedia pages will gain links to these articles as authoritative pieces.

Re:More of a blog than an encyclopedia

[halsver]

"On the third hand..."
"I'd like to ponder it, but I ran out of hands."

So you didn't run out at two hands, but at three hands. You must be 50% more efficient than the rest of us with that third hand! Unless of course you just use that third hand for pondering, in which case you'd be 50% less efficient!

Re:More of a blog than an encyclopedia

[DragonWriter]

I've only really looked at this article, which was the most prominently featured on their front page. Reading the first few paragraphs it comes across as one persons view and experiences as opposed to an encyclopaedia. Some work will need to be done on this if it is to be a serious challenger to Wikipedia.

Its not really a direct challenger to Wikipedia, its a pretty different concept but Wikipedia is the most familiar thing to most readers that is somewhat similar, so they get portrayed as being head-to-head competitors. Its not at all aimed at being encyclopedic in the way Wikipedia is. Aside from the medical articles, the next biggest group seems to be "how-to" articles that would be out-of-scope for Wikipedia. Its also not a single, coherent, community-edited work with policies designed to promote consistent style and non-duplication.

Its more a "marketplace of articles", some of which may be collaborative, than an encyclopedia.

Re:More of a blog than an encyclopedia

[SevenSpirits]

If you'd read past the first section, which was an introduction, you would have found that the rest of the article was much less personal and very informative.

Re:More of a blog than an encyclopedia

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't think of it as a competitor to Wikipedia, and it's definitely not an encyclopedia. It's just another place to host long form content (long for the internet, that is) and the major difference from other sites is that it heavily promote the identity of the author.

Re:More of a blog than an encyclopedia

[Crazyswedishguy]

Does it come as a surprise that the writer of said article is a software engineer from Mountain View?

Although to be fair I don't think it's one of those shameless acts of self-promotion, but rather an effort to get the Knol submission started.

Re:More of a blog than an encyclopedia

[Crazyswedishguy]

Actually, that third hand comes in really handy (no pun intended) when you're a basement-dwelling slashdotter!

Re:More of a blog than an encyclopedia

[Anonymous Coward]

Agree.
It could be more bloggers will move their blogs there. A center of bloggers? I don't say this is bad.

Re:More of a blog than an encyclopedia

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm torn, on the one hand I see this as a great way to categorize knowledge, having wikipedia as a wide but non-authoritative source of knowledge and knol as an authoritative one would have them complement each other rather than compete with each other.

Why be torn at all? These projects only compete in the mind of the press and on blogs. Google hasn't let out a peep calling this any sort of competitor to Wikipedia, because it isn't. Knol is another about.com, and I hope they wipe the floor with them, because about.com could definitely be done better. Single-author "expert" articles going deeply into specific subjects are a great compliment to collectively edited shallow[1] articles with good cross links and broad coverage.

[1] Shallow insofar as they try to keep very close to the references, which is fine because it's the only way you can keep order on collectively edited works.

Re:More of a blog than an encyclopedia

[nifboy]

...Wikipedians will be able to access and cite Knols with far greater ease than other more traditional sources.

Probably not. Knols are (for the most part) one-man articles, without any practical fact-checking mechanisms or other safeguards that make traditional sources cite-worthy. In fact, I fully expect Knol to fill up with cranks, pseudo-science, conspiracy-theorists and other questionably-scientific articles that, when brought to the general community's attention, don't hold up under pretty basic scrutiny.

The real value is in the sources they cite, just like a Wikipedia article.

Re:More of a blog than an encyclopedia

[David Gerard]

The whole thing is a media-fueled "let's you and him fight." The thing we at Wikipedia are most interested by is that the Knols are free content by default (CC-BY 3.0). That's a significant difference from about.com.

Typing Equations?

[biased_estimator]

I only looked at it briefly, but they don't provide an easy way to type equations? I suppose that might be a lot to ask for... I guess I'll just have to LaTeXiT.

Re:Typing Equations?

[Koiu Lpoi]

I suppose that might be a lot to ask for... I guess I'll just have to LaTeXiT

Right, too much to ask for. How old is TeX, again? And we all know it's not the only package out there that offers equations. So no, it's not too much to ask for.

Scholarpedia?

[jnana]

On the topic of Wikipedia-like sites, I recently found Scholarpedia, which I imagine a lot of slashdotters might like. They don't have that much content yet, and they are currently focusing on a few fields (science- and tech-related), but I have found some really high-quality articles by experts in the field, like:

Neural Correlates of Consciousness, by Christof Koch.

Algorithmic Information Theory, my Marcus Hutter.

Re:Scholarpedia?

[geekoid]

nobod with this color scheme on a home page should be allow to post anything, ever~
http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~koch/index-main-page.html

Re:Scholarpedia?

[jnana]

Yeah, that dark blue text on black background is practically unreadable on my monitor...

Re:Scholarpedia?

[jmv]

I came across Scholarpedia a while ago and noted some non-free license issues. Now, it seems to be fine, so I'm not sure whether they changed the license or whether I just made stuff up that wasn't there.

Re:Scholarpedia?

[KGIII]

Yes, I am just poking at you but... I have read two of your posts in this thread today and no one who spells (or types) as poorly as you do should be making punctuation/grammar rules.~ (Preview and spell checking now available in all major browsers.)

Re:Scholarpedia?

[Anonymous Coward]

Christof is a little insane, but very smart.

Re:Scholarpedia?

[Eighty7]

Have you seen the list of recent changes? That's the surest sign of a dead wiki.

Re:Scholarpedia?

[jnana]

No, I hadn't. It does not look like much is happening from that page, which is quite sad.

Re:Scholarpedia?

[S3D]

For science- and tech-related wiki it has surprisingly poor science and tech content.
Category theory - one of the most promising branch of modern mathematics - no article in Scholarpedia
Quantum field theory should I explain how important it is? - no article in Scholarpedia.
Homo florensis - One of the most fascinating discovery of modern paleoanthropology - no article in Scholarpedia.
Ok, may be it's better with tech ? Let's check the area where I have some experience - computer vision:
Feature detection - one of the basis of computer vision - no article in Scholarpedia
SIFT - no article in Scholarpedia
OK' that's enough.
Right now Scholarpedia is pretty much useless, and I don't see the reason why it should become better.

Re:Scholarpedia?

[jnana]

Like I said, it doesn't have a lot of content but much of the content that it does have, like the two articles I noted, is very high quality and authoritative, by experts in the field (i.e., far superior to Wikipedia).

The fields they currently list are astrophysics, computational neuroscience, computational intelligence, dynamical systems, and physics (it looks there is stuff planned for quantum field theory and related: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Category:Quantum_and_Statistical_Field_Theory).

So yeah, if you want to use it as an encyclopedia to search for random things, it is nearly useless. If you want to browse it for high-quality, authoritative articles by experts, it is a useful resource.

Make your own rules!

[tttonyyy]

In my version of Medipedia, picking your nose and then eating it is allowed. ;)

It's all about hot, nasty, BA speed...

[Adreno]

While I understand the theory behind Knol, it's going to take Google an *awful* long time to catch up to Wikipedia in terms of volume, if at all. While Wiki may have its fair share of "useless crap", it makes the publication process many orders of magnitude faster than Knol can probably ever hope of achieving. Thoughts? Can Knol catch up with Wiki in at least "useful volume"?

Re:It's all about hot, nasty, BA speed...

[gmuslera]

All depend on the number of people wanting to put content there.

But i dont see it as a Wikipedia replacement. Wikipedia mean to be not only the reference on a particular topic, but also something objective, not attached to a particular person or how that person sees reality. In the other hand, at least some articles in Knol gave me the idea that more focused in how the author see something. Wikipedia goes for "This is that" vs Knol's "This is how i see that"

Re:It's all about hot, nasty, BA speed...

[thedrx]

They could always buy Wikipedia... wait.

Re:It's all about hot, nasty, BA speed...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a huge underestimation by those who haven't edited Wikipedia of just how much effort goes into tidying things up over there. What reminded me of this was your phrase "useful volume" -- there are hoards of editors who busy themselves renaming articles to fit into sensible naming conventions, inter-linking articles to each other, creating disambiguation pages, fixing broken URLs....

It's this army behind the scenes that takes Wikipedia from being a heap of raw data and turns it into "useful volume," and knol has no such infrastructure built in.

Another useless Google feature....

[boxless]

You won't be using in a year.

Should be an article on conjunctions

[MarkTraceur]

From the content policy:
"Pedophilia, Incest and Bestiality:
Users may not publish written, image, audio or video content that promotes pedophilia, incest and bestiality."

They never said we couldn't promote pedophilia, incest, OR bestiality. First person to get an apology from Google for this gets bonus points :) Screenshot or it didn't happen!

The Grassy Knol

[MRe_nl]

everything you allways wanted to know about pot
and dead kennedys
but were afraid to ask.

Knol on Wikipedia, Wikipedia on Knol

[Glasswire]

Knol on Wikipedia is pretty empty. Whereas
Wikipedia on Knol is very informative.
Is that an indicator?

Re:Knol on Wikipedia, Wikipedia on Knol

[ornil]

I'd say that's an indicator of the fact that Wikipedia has a million entries (after years of work), and Knol has maybe a few thousand. Let's see how fast it grows - that'd be a real indication.

Re:Knol on Wikipedia, Wikipedia on Knol

[pablomme]

Wikipedia has a million entries

Make that 2.5 million. Man is it big..

Re:Knol on Wikipedia, Wikipedia on Knol

[Glasswire]

The point of this comparison is not the mass of existing entries, but how the two see a current relatively new, extremely relivant subject: Knol - in comparison to the incumbent Wikipedia. For Knol not to even have an entry for Wikipedia, it's major alternative is interesting. But Wikipedia has an extensive discussion about what's right and wrong with Knol.
Perhaps I should have looked at Knol on Knol and Wikipedia on Wikipedia, but I'm fairly sure Wikipedia will be much better.

interface problems ?

[cinnamon colbert]

we "all" "know" how to use wikipedia, knol and others that start with a different gui have a problem ?
I know i spent a lot of time learning wikipedia, and am reluctant to switch; also, in the medical field that the current knol home page highlights, wikipedia is remarkably good

Too many pedias

[Pincus]

Has anyone purchased pedipedia.org/.com, to create the site tracking the hundreds of Wikipedia offspring?

s/Wikipedia/about.com/

[rmassa]

This seems like a less-crappy version of about.com and not anything at all like Wikipedia. Perhaps that's who Google is really "competing" with?

Monopolization of facts

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems that there is nothing to stop someone starting a knol, entering a totally biased entry, and stopping others contributing to it. The creator of the knol has absolute control over it. Am I wrong, or does this sound problematic to you?

Re:Monopolization of facts

[jjohnson]

Ask the editors of Conservapedia whether it's a problem.

Re:Monopolization of facts

[SevenSpirits]

It's more like a free market of facts. Your crappy entry will get modded down, and some better article on the same topic will get the traffic.

evil?

[ionix5891]

1. scrape wikipedia
2. post to knol
3. ??
4. profit

Ok, everyone start writing wikipedia bots!

[caywen]

I just watched "Mongol" which I liked. I just searched Knol for "Mongolia" and came up with no results. I will check back in 3 days. If there is still no entry on Mongolia, my sense will be that Wikipedia will not be very challenged. Just like I instinctively go to google.com for miscellaneous searches, I instinctively go to wikipedia for learning.

A problem with "experts"

[grantham]

While I think Wikipedia could use more editing by experts, I don't know that this is the way to do it. When I checked out the site earlier, one of the pages featured was Steve Pantilat, M.D.. The expert on this individual? Steve Pantilat. Wonder how many critical edits of Steve Pantilat will make it past the editor.

Re:A problem with "experts"

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, Steve's a nice guy! Don't pick on him. Besides, that is a bad example. While he is biased, one could argue that no author cold ever be more of an expert on "Steve Pantilat, M.D." than Steve himself. A better example for your argument would be eczema. Lots of people know as much or more about that disease than Dr. Cho, the author of the knol. Since I assume Google doesn't want to arbitrate a fight over the title, they must be planning to allow hundreds of knol's titled "Eczema" Come to think of it, you could create your own "Steve Pantilat, M.D." knol and say whatever you want about him. Just remember, (in theory) you can't do it anonymously.

Re:A problem with "experts"

[SevenSpirits]

"This is a special knol where you can write about yourself. It was automatically created when you first signed into Knol, and it is always published (i.e. everyone can see what you are writing here). Please use this knol to tell your readers about yourself. By default, this is the page readers will be directed to when clicking on your name within the Knol environment. If you want to write a knol about something else, please click the [Write a Knol] link."

Bio pages appear to be a feature of the site.

Dumb, dumb, dumb

[ZarathustraDK]

Part of gaining neutral information about a subject is through logic and reasoning, discourse and all those other forgotten arts.

Having some egotripping expert beat everyone on their heads with his Ph.d. might be good to get the perceived truth out there.

But what if the egotripping expert just happened to be plain wrong?

Yeah sorry, I'm an egotripper with a BA in philosophy, and I just happen to be of the oppinion that Logic and Argumentation trumphs any degree.

Re:Dumb, dumb, dumb

[DragonWriter]

Part of gaining neutral information about a subject is through logic and reasoning, discourse and all those other forgotten arts.

Which Knol allows. While portrayed here as an "expert Wiki", its really not "expert" and, while in some sense Wiki-like, isn't much Wikipedia-like. Anyone can write a knol, on any topic, there is no "expertise" requirement.

Re:Dumb, dumb, dumb

[jjohnson]

As a fellow egotripper with a BA in philosophy, I'll agree that logic and argumentation can trump a degree. But as Wikipedia aptly demonstrates, in order for dialogue to arrive at the best, neutral information, the participants have to be 1) logical, and 2) knowledgeable. Wikipedia fails repeatedly on any contentious topic because participation is a sufficient credential, where expertise really would make a difference.

Re:Dumb, dumb, dumb

[ZarathustraDK]

Well it's between a stone and a hard case. Either one tries to extinguish to illogicity of the horde, or start to assign 'merit-multipliers', thereby implying ones statement trumphs the others simply because of an education-acronym one happen to posses.

I'd rather see some effort in constructing some forum-software where you can assign fallacies to individual threads in a meaningful way. Illogical people love having lots of people giving them attention by replying in public viewable messages (visit youtube). However they hate having a huge graphic sticker saying 'stupid','ad ignorantiam' etc. next to their name. Then again, there'd be the problem of how to secure against misuse of such a system.

Re:Dumb, dumb, dumb

[speedtux]

sufficient credential, where expertise really would make a difference.

OK, and what do credentials have to do with expertise?

Re:Dumb, dumb, dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm probably showing my "liberal" bias here, no doubt the staunch Republicans will disagree, but I'd agree about the contentious topics getting ruined by low quality contributors.

Typically, I'll find a really high quality insightful article and be really impressed but then a few months later I'll visit the same article again and the article will have become watered down garbage. When I look at the history it becomes apparent that what happened is the article got discovered by one of those people who view Fox news as The Ultimate Source of Truth and that person then went through and deleted out anything that might contradict the Fox News world view.

Since, in the wikipedia world, enthusiasm wins over expertise, ultimately it is the Fox News compatible article that wins out.

Re:Dumb, dumb, dumb

[KGIII]

Umm... Most of the time? Quite a lot. I even insist my mechanic have credentials, as I do my lawyer, doctor, dentist, and accountant. Having credentials typically means having shown the minimal amount of knowledge required to be consided an expert by the standards set in society. There are, of course, exceptions to that rule.

Re:Dumb, dumb, dumb

[jjohnson]

Usually credentials are a sign of some expertise, but that wasn't my point. I was observing that Wikipedia suffers from a lack of expertise because the only requirement for editing an article is the willingness to edit it, not some demonstrable expertise in the subject matter.

pedipedia.org

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like something for NAMBLA members or other sexual predators, or maybe a NBC sting operation to catch those people.

Wikipedia is a large stategic threat to Google

[solferino]

I've said it before on Slashdot. Wikipedia is a large strategic threat to Google.

With things like the Wikipedia search box in Firefox people can go directly to the Wikipedia page on a subject rather than type it in to Google. If they want to read further they will follow the external links at the bottom of the page. Every time they go to Wikipedia directly that is lost revenue for Google.

Search engines are good but they are good for active thinkers. Most people are passive readers and they just want to read a basic overview and have a few selected quality links to take them further if need be.

Hence Knol. Google's competitor to Wikipedia. But it's too late. Good.

Re:Wikipedia is a large stategic threat to Google

[SanityInAnarchy]

With things like the Wikipedia search box in Firefox people can go directly to the Wikipedia page on a subject rather than type it in to Google.

However, I usually search through Google first, even if the first result might be Wikipedia -- because Google is a broader search.

Wikipedia may well have a detailed, informative article, which links to decent external sources -- then again, it might have no article, or a biased, poorly maintained article.

If I search directly on Wikipedia, the lack of a Wikipedia article means I'll have to repeat that search on Google, or elsewhere -- plus, the Wikipedia search is slower. If I search on Google first, if there's a Wikipedia article, great, it's one click away -- and if there isn't, I've still got a page full of useful results.

Hence Knol. Google's competitor to Wikipedia. But it's too late. Good.

Why is that good? If Knol can actually do a better job than Wikipedia, what's the problem?

I'm not entirely sure why I should trust Wikimedia with my personal information any more than Google. The only real advantage here is the possibility of releasing something anonymously -- which I can still do, through Wikipedia, or Wikileaks, or somewhere else.

Creative Commons means that if someone really has something to add, and I won't let them (or co-author with them), they can always re-publish as their own version -- in this sense, Knol is to Wikipedia as Git is to SVN.

And it means my work is still out there to read, for free, but I'll be getting paid, which means I'll have an incentive to spend more time on it. Say what you will -- Wikipedia is great for the kind of reference material which is truly a list of indisputable facts -- but commercial books (technical manuals, etc) often have better quality for things like teaching fundamentals, or, occasionally, simply being more comprehensive even than the official online documentation.

That would be the main reason Knol could work -- capitalism.

Re:Wikipedia is a large stategic threat to Google

[Anonymous Coward]

what makes you think its too late ??
wikipedia will die just like google killed altavista. its never too late for a better system to be put in place. 2nd mover advantage.
contributions are already slowing to the wiki foundation and they have no business income.

Re:Wikipedia is a large stategic threat to Google

[hacker]

If I search directly on Wikipedia, the lack of a Wikipedia article means I'll have to repeat that search on Google, or elsewhere -- plus, the Wikipedia search is slower. If I search on Google first, if there's a Wikipedia article, great, it's one click away -- and if there isn't, I've still got a page full of useful results.

Let me introduce you to the Googlepedia Firefox Add-on, which solves this in one step.

not impressed

[speedtux]

I like a lot of Google things, but Knol leaves me scratching my head. Knol articles are just that: plain articles with very little structure or linking. And I don't think that one expert can compete with dozens of people collaborating on an article.

A lot of the stuff on Knol is CC. Perhaps it could legally be incorporated into Wikipedia. But, frankly, I don't see why anybody would bother.

Re:not impressed

[SanityInAnarchy]

Knol articles are just that: plain articles with very little structure or linking.

They are, however, searchable -- and more easily searchable when you can get the whole thing as one page.

And "very little structure or linking" is entirely up to the author -- but at this early stage, there is at least less to link to within Knol.

And I don't think that one expert can compete with dozens of people collaborating on an article.

It's not so much "one expert" as "one person, who is actually being paid" -- not to mention that having two well-developed, dissenting articles could be more useful than either the homogenized compromise in the Wiki page itself, or the archived flamewars on the Discussion tab.

It's the Mythical Man-Month all over again.

A lot of the stuff on Knol is CC. Perhaps it could legally be incorporated into Wikipedia. But, frankly, I don't see why anybody would bother.

Perhaps if the content is good?

Why does anyone bother adding things to Wikipedia? If you can answer that question, see if it's applicable to migrating Knol articles to Wikipedia.

Re:not impressed

[speedtux]

And "very little structure or linking" is entirely up to the author

Yes, and in Wikipedia, it is not.

It's not so much "one expert" as "one person, who is actually being paid"

And where's the evidence that "actually being paid" makes these articles better?

not to mention that having two well-developed, dissenting articles could be more useful than either the homogenized compromise

I find two dissenting articles much less useful than one homogenized compromise. Remember, when going to Wikipedia, I want an answer, I don't want to have to do a lengthy analysis. When I want to do an analysis, I just go to the primary literature.

Perhaps if the content is good?

But I don't think it is.

Why does anyone bother adding things to Wikipedia?

Because people have an interest in communicating their view of the world.

see if it's applicable to migrating Knol articles to Wikipedia.

No, it doesn't apply to migrating Knol articles to Wikipedia, except if the original author does it (in which case he is just a Wikipedia contributor and has to change his content substantially).

I think Knol just misses the point of Wikipedia and why it has become so successful.

Re:not impressed

[SanityInAnarchy]

Yes, and in Wikipedia, it is not.

Actually, it is. The only difference is that community rules lead to pressure, and the collective author ends up writing highly structured, linked documents -- most of the time.

And where's the evidence that "actually being paid" makes these articles better?

Anecdotal evidence on my part. A simple example: I've found The Rails Way to actually be a better reference -- not tutorial, but reference -- than the API docs and Google combined.

Of course, as a user, I'd rather have a publicly available, free resource, and heavily structured if it's to be a reference. Despite this, the sheer quality of that book, and the occasional sparseness of online documentation (especially concerning best practices), made it worthwhile to pay for.

Only difference with Knol is, I'd get it for free.

I find two dissenting articles much less useful than one homogenized compromise.

Sometimes. Sometimes, the homogenized compromise is simply wrong. Often, Wikipedia doesn't manage that -- you still have the two dissenting articles, but it's a lot harder to tell them apart (you have to dig through the edit history).

When I want to do an analysis, I just go to the primary literature.

Knol could be that primary literature.

But I don't think it is.

It's been out for exactly one day. What did Wikipedia have after 24 hours?

I am predicting that Knol will have some better articles than Wikipedia. But honestly, neither of us knows yet.

Because people have an interest in communicating their view of the world.

That sounds more Knol than Wikipedia -- Knol is all about a personal point of view. Wikipedia only helps you "communicate your view of the world" if that view is from a neutral perspective.

Furthermore, Wikipedia is not for original research, which is why you see all those [Citation needed] stickers.

I think Knol just misses the point of Wikipedia and why it has become so successful.

Because you've bought into the Slashdot meme that Knol is meant to be a replacement for Wikipedia. I'm not sure it is.

But I'll argue it could easily become a replacement for O'Reilly.

pr0n

[Anonymous Coward]

And now Google is clearly on the
dark side!

And this is just a beta! Can you imagine what you will be getting when it's finished!

Re:pr0n

[SplinterOfChaos]

I LOVE how they use lighting to make the un-"enhanced" women look paler and less healthy. It's good to finally see a place I can go to and know I'm given unbiased, true information.

Re:pr0n

[asCii88]

Google's Knoll service is responsible for 2% of the world's porn hosted on the Web, according to a new report.

Re:pr0n

[rrohbeck]

Yeah, replacing a perfectly nice set of small breasts with a pair of ridiculous balls (2nd pair of photos) must obviously be a cosmetic improvement. This is an ad, including the phone number for referral to a surgeon.

What happens when

[gorrepati]

Somebody who is an "expert", copies stuff from wikipedia on knoll, and tries to get paid for it?

Re:What happens when

[Wesley Felter]

Nobody ever sees that article because it has no PageRank, thus no ad revenue.

Search broken?

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything I search for comes up with "No results found". Is the search feature broken, or is there just a lack of content on the site?

Licensing

[SanityInAnarchy]

I was all set to rant about what license they wanted to publish on, and would Google own everything, etc.

But it looks like they're going with Creative Commons or keep it to yourself. And I don't see any requirement to sign over the copyright, so I could always publish something both on Knol and elsewhere, under entirely different terms. Cool!

I could, however, rant about how it's not a wiki at all.

Medical articles

[Anonymous Coward]

I just checked some of the medical articles on Knol, since that's what I know about.

I looked at Ovarian Cancer and Lung Cancer, since they were featured on the opening page, and I've written about that myself. They seemed to be written by a doctor, and were quite informative, interesting and comprehensive. It looked like a chapter from a medical textbook -- although a standard medical textbook is more authoritative.

I have one major objection: These are incurable cancers, and death comes pretty fast. Most cancer patients want to know how long they've got to live (yes, every case is different, but a specific cancer usually has a median life expectancy with a published mortality curve). Neither of these 2 entries gave the mortality statistics. They even talk about "cure", which is deceptive and, I think, unethical. I remember one student who thought his father was cured of lung cancer, so he went away on vacation. He said that if he knew his father was so close to death, he would have spent his last weeks with him. Most of the Wikipedia articles do discuss mortality, although there are often debates over that.

The other thing I prefer about Wikipedia over Knol is that Wikipedia is edited by an amazing collection of biology graduate students. The medical articles go into these great diversions on molecular biology, evolution and history of medicine that I've never seen in a "medical advice for the layman" web site or book. They don't just explain the electrocardiogram, they tell you how it was invented. I can look up every protein in the heart muscle, in language that I can understand.

I also like the way Wikipedia handles controversy. A Wikipedia article is like a battlefield. Some people are assholes pushing their own pet ideas, but in return you get ideas that other people would rather keep quiet. (I wonder what Knol's entries on Israel/Palestine will look like.)

Wikipedia is more disorganized, haphazard and awfully stupid sometimes, but I want imaginative ideas and I'm willing to put up with stupidity and do my own critical thinking to get them.

The best solution is to have more Wikipedias in competition with each other. This is great.

Hemorrhoids

[hansamurai]

All I know is that I was able to read the Hemorrhoids article without seeing a bunch of "action shots" like on Wikipedia. They've won me over.

Re:Hemorrhoids

[MisterBlueSky]

Hmm.. in that case you won't like this one: http://knol.google.com/k/jacob-greenberg/an-overview-of-rectal-surgery/3eowa2daqlxkq/2#

Block google text ads

[Anonymous Coward]

So I just built this little firefox extension (tested in 3 only so far), it will block google text ads by hiding them on the right side of the page but it has a link to view the ads anyway.

Try it out.

Firefox Seach Field

[Anonymous Coward]

I notice that Knol isn't selectable under the 'Get More Search Engines' link for the search field in firefox. Anybody know how to add it as a search engine? Inquiring minds** need to know!!!

**Okay, just google fanbois.

pay for content?

[davejenkins]

Google is in it to test their idea of "micro-content for micro-payment", IMHO. The idea that people are supposed to write blogs and run google ads on those blogs worked for a while, until the masses figured out that we don't have that much to say. So, what if people could contribute a 'fraction' of a blog or content, and subsequently get a 'fraction' of the ad revenue? It makes sense from Google's business model, as sort of a lower price entry point for writers/ad buyers.

I don't think it will work, but then again, I have a bias toward robust wikis.

NO pedophilia, incest and bestiality?

[mangu]

Doh, I was going to publish an article on "The Sexual Mores of Rednecks".

Well, I guess it's off to Wikipedia I go. Or do you think the Britannica would be willing to buy my text?

Used to shoot definitions in my T-16 back home

[MarkTraceur]

Well, Wikipedia's been proven nearly as accurate as Brittanica recently, so a little shock value couldn't hurt...

Clever..

[kunwon1]

From http://knol.google.com/ ...

Who needs a search engine? Ctrl+F

Re:Clever..

[SamSim]

Not only is this ironic for a Google site, it didn't work for me in FF3...

Knol citing Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

The Knol article on Orchids is citing a Wikipedia article

according to google

[aceofspades626]

Suppose it's related that Google's own "quote of the day" today is: "My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared." - PJ Plauger ??

wtf???

[Anonymous Coward]

google ... give it up. there's a difference between trying to organize the world's information and dominate/own it all -- unless you want to become a big central backup for our information ... in which case I have a big HD full of porn, vidcapped movies, and pre-DRM mp3's you can back up for me.

don't break what ain't fixed.

Re:Losing Anonymity? 8-bit? Haiku?

[R4wBon3]

Thanks for pointing that out.. Otherwise I would've continued to think he was writing an on-topic poem on his 8-bit terminal.

Re:Losing Anonymity? 8-bit? Haiku?

[KGIII]

Do a web search for a man named "Gri" and have fun. He visited my forum, it was great. Really, go search for him. It will take a few hours and then you'll be able to speak Gri... Ah... Grivitation.

Re:Losing Anonymity? 8-bit? Haiku?

[R4wBon3]

So now we not only need to worry about getting a ticket from the 'Grammar Police', we also need to be concerned about the style-format-flow-forum_method vigilantes?

Competitor?

[NoCowardsHere]

People keep talking about Knol as a "competitor" or "challenger" to wikipedia, asking whether it can ever "catch up," etc. I think they are two very different and highly complementary services. Wikipedia in particular stands to benefit greatly from Knol.

Remember, Wikipedia is not for original research; as an encyclopedia, all content in wikipedia is supposed to be based on information published elsewhere by experts. Knol is a repository of exactly that. If Knol takes off, then I think we'll see a lot of Knol articles referenced in wikipedia. The CC licenses mean that significant portions of Knol articles can be taken verbatim and used as a base for stub wikipedia articles. In short, Knol could be the best thing that's happened to Wikipedia since they invented the [citation needed] tag.

They complement each other in other ways, too. All content on Wikipedia must be written with a neutral point of view; Knol accepts multiple articles on any subject, so everybody can present their own personal point of view. Wikipedia is a tightly integrated web of information; while Knol is a collection of independent "units of knowledge."

Each can benefit from the other, but Wikipedia in particular has much to gain if Knol succeeds; by consolidating and cross-referencing information from Knol with dozens of other sources, Wikipedia will add tremendous value to the data, just as it already does with much of the information available on the web today.

Re:Competitor?

[R55]

Exactly! Wikipedia will get a friendly credible source!

Re:Competitor?

[SerfsUp]

For more on Knol, issues of competion, and potential Google conflicts of interest check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol Of course

Re:Competitor?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia won't use knols as stubs because they're not reliable sources. If the knol lists reliable sources, Wikipedians will simply use those as the basis for stubs, rather than the knol itself.

Knols will be given the same credence on Wikipedia that blogs are: they are evidence only of their own existence, which, outside the "knol" article, won't be very useful.

Re:Losing Anonymity? 8-bit? Haiku?

[KGIII]

LOL Probably but, really, when you get a few hours of spare time go find Gri. I can't guarantee that you'll be amused but I suspect that you will be.

It will be "fun" to reference knol at wiki...

[jerryasher]

It will be fun to cite knol articles in wiki articles. I bet that shoots the blood pressure of the Wikipedia Sea Organization sky high!

Knol provides very little knowledge...

[Fulg0re-]

I don't think that having so-called "experts" contributing to Google Knol is necessarily going to make it a better overall resource that Wikipedia for several reasons.

Firstly, a lot of these early articles are seriously lacking. Let's take for example, the article on Methicillin Resistant Staphlococcus Aureus (MRSA). It's a generally well-written article, and the author looks to be fairly reputable. Nonetheless, there are arguably some significant deficiencies, that with the current format of Knol, cannot be rectified.

In the article's description, the author notes that there will be a discussion on how MRSA can be treated. Yet, when you look at that portion of the article, information on management is seriously lacking, and the description of the medications is ultimately quite useless.

At least with Wikipedia, the article would link to a corresponding article on the specific antibiotic, so you would have the opportunity to easily gain further information, whereas with Knol, this simple linking procedure is currently lacking significantly.

Now, for a simple example. Having a description that Vancomycin "is considered first line treatment" for MRSA is useless for any practicing clinician. What I would want to know are things such as dosing regimens, important things to remember such as having to measure Vancomycin trough levels every several doses (and why), what alternative medications I can use if the MRSA strain is resistant to Vancomycin, etc., all of which are extremely important in the management of MRSA. There is also a significant lack of information about what strains are prevalent, which although not necessarily important for an Internist, is important for Infectious Disease specialists, the people who are consulted on a daily basis for the management of MRSA.

I can continue to criticize the article, but the difference between it, and the Wikipedia entry are night-and-day. And my criticism isn't pointed to this article alone, there are countless very poorly written and uninformative medical articles on there thus far.

A community effort with anonymous editors will (eventually) weed out mistakes, and have the distinct advantage of constant peer review. Knol on the other hand, is unfortunately stuck with the one author knows best paradigm.

Close to become a fifth race! Yeah!

[kusmin]

Remember Asgard guys saying "People of Earth are on the path to a powerful civilization and close to becoming a fifth race."? I would not be surprised if the real creators of Google were Daniel and Sam Carter. Possibly, with some help from McKay. Of course, it's classified. Wel'll never know.

Nobody competes with Wikipedia

[kusmin]

What I do not understand: why people think
sorry, got interrupted.
Why people think someone competes (or even wants to compete) with Wikipedia? Wikipedia contains compilations of information from sources which *and* by people who probably can not be trusted. If you want to make a decision about something important never trust single source. Potentially, on any topic Knol could offer several articles, all signed by names that you can track.
An example.
You are blind and deaf, and you meet someone for the first time, and he or she says: to make a nice apple juice, you should do as follows. Step 1, 2, .. 5. Then another (unknown to you) guy interrupts and says: "step 5 is wrong". Then other completely unknown to you people offer some tips. Well, I would be lost.
An alternative.
Someone says to you: I'm John McRight from Chicago, I do apple juice for years, Do it in a following way..
You don't have follow his advice, you may read a book *by Mary Simmons from Bloomington*.
----- Knol will be a great thing. -----

Ugly old horse

[SanderDJ]

In Dutch, "knol" means ugly old horse (think: Sarah Jessica Parker). Weird choice.

Pedophilia, Incest and Bestiality:

[Per Abrahamsen]

They never said we couldn't promote pedophilia, incest, OR bestiality.

But if we can't encourage animals to have sex with their own offspring, what is the point of writing anything at all?

PS: Animals! Have sex with your own offspring!

Re:Pedophilia, Incest and Bestiality:

[omnicron13]

But if we can't encourage animals to have sex with their own offspring, what is the point of writing anything at all?

An animal having sex with a member of its own species isn't bestiality, so this is still fair game for Knol.

Reliable source?

[Per Abrahamsen]

While it is not anonymous, it still hasn't any editor, so it probably won't qualify as a reliable source for the Wikipedia standards.

It is on par with a non-anonymous blog, which doesn't qualify either.

Does it?

[Moraelin]

Does it? You mean, the way an article about cloning didgeridoos, complete with pictures of little didgeridoos in test tubes, stayed on de.wikipedia.org for more than a year?

Generally that's my "problem" with Wikipedia. It seems that when I don't know anything about a topic, whoa, look at all the new things I find out there. When I do have even the minimum clue on the topic, I start noticing such things as iron being extracted from monkeys or that one of the bridges of ancient Rome was built in 1999 in Japan. (Hell of a time machine, that, not to mention valuable insight into offshoring;) Which kinda makes me wonder about the former category too.

Yes, I could follow the links to blogs and other such reputable first sources, study the edit history, etc. I'm a lazy guy, you know? Of Knoll offers me a tenth of that, but it's from a reputable source (as opposed to some random kid who claim to have a doctorate, like on Wikipedia) and peer reviewed, I'll prefer it every time.

Re:Does it?

[snowgirl]

And what do you think Knol's article on San Serriffe will be?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Serriffe

Sometimes, hoaxes are notable enough to be articles themselves. As well, recall the policy No climbing the Reichstag dressed as Spider-Man.

Some people don't have a sense of humor in some cases, so relax. I've found that the majority of information available on the subjects I care about on Wikipedia are accurate and insightful.

America is the Source of All Wisdom

[JasonNolan]

You can't be a member unless you're american, or are willing to fake your ID. Yes, it is beta. Poor google can't to global authentication? Heh. Just another 'global' company who thinks of the world after the fact. Hegemonic? Wow!

Site similar to Google Knol for sale

[nutkenz]

If anyone is interested in purchasing http://www.oondi.com/ which is a website similar to Google Knol, send an e-mail to info [AT] oondi [DOT] com. The time is now for these types of websites; the business model has just been validated by Google. The distinct advantage of oondi.com is that the site also targets other languages such as Dutch and French, which is unique in comparison to Squidoo, HubPages, Google Knol, etc... Serious inquiries or offers only please. oondi.com

Process and the alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

Having tried and also evaluated Wikipedia I can attest the process i broken, the edit wars and ego pumping edit counts is getting in the way of getting good, as opposed to mediocre, articles.

I gave it 2 years and comcluded there is no hope with the current culture and lack of process where posses of deletionists rampage through the articles. Rather then improve they consider deletion is the best. I gave up.

Knol offers an alternative: some editors with per article editing control and feedback that people can actually pay attention to. I for one will start contributing to Knol.

Space for introductory articles

[AlpineR]

The plain old bag o' knols showed me An Introduction To Binary.

The article itself is pretty dreadful, but it would be nice if someone wrote a clear and simple competitor. I search for technical topics on Wikipedia and find that they're too complicated to follow unless you already know the subject.

I think what happens in Wikipedia is that someone writes an original article that is fairly simple. Then someone else comes by and says "Hey, you forgot about this generalization and that complicated special case" and revises the article to be more accurate but less simple. Over months of edits, the article morphs into something that only the experts can understand and is pretty worthless for new readers.

Once in a while I get lucky and find some online tutorial or an independent article written by an academic. If Knol leads to more introductory articles like that then I'll be happy with it.

I've seen this before...

[MrMonroe]

Well, I used the search function, on the assumption that the handful of unrelated articles (two on urinary tract infection and two on gastrointestinal bleeding, though) listed at the bottom of the home page couldn't possibly be all there was to offer.

No results found for Iraq
No results found for Particle Acceleration
No results found for United States of America
No results found for Liberalism
And possibly most deplorable, No results found for Kevin Bacon

Well. Either I have some writing to do or I can just keep using Wikipedia. This is going to be just like all those other silly little "expert-written" sites. Lots of people coming on and writing very general articles about completely random subjects. People might find these in a web search if Google weights the site really heavily, but no one is going to go there to look for something.

Re:I've seen this before...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I used the search function, on the assumption that the handful of unrelated articles (two on urinary tract infection and two on gastrointestinal bleeding, though) listed at the bottom of the home page couldn't possibly be all there was to offer.

No results found for Iraq

No results found for Particle Acceleration

No results found for United States of America

No results found for Liberalism

And possibly most deplorable, No results found for Kevin Bacon

Well. Either I have some writing to do or I can just keep using Wikipedia. This is going to be just like all those other silly little "expert-written" sites. Lots of people coming on and writing very general articles about completely random subjects. People might find these in a web search if Google weights the site really heavily, but no one is going to go there to look for something.

how old is knol?

give it time to start collecting content.
its just way too early to judge how good or bad that sight will be.

More ads?

[neural cooker]

Ads on a "Wikipedia". No thanks. There's going to be some people writing articles just for ad revenue.

Important Stuff

[ClarifyAmbiguity]

Good to see we're getting to the Important Stuff first...

Squidoo not Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

The articles represent one person's view on a topic - more in line with Squidoo's lenses than Wikipedia.

Experts?

[Anonymous Coward]

And here I thought these were "experts" that weren't anonymous...

From the main page An Expert opinion

Oh and Chewy- thought DMC4 was "extremely awesome."

(I'm aware of the irony of talking about anonymity as an anonymous coward.)

Google Search Better?

[bill_mcgonigle]

With things like the Wikipedia search box in Firefox people can go directly to the Wikipedia page on a subject rather than type it in to Google.

Really? I think the Google search is so much better that I've defined a Firefox shortcut for it:

Name: Wikipedia Search
Location: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&c2coff=1&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aunofficial&hs=XRD&q=%25s+site%3Aen.wikipedia.org&btnG=Search
Keyword: w

So I can just go to my URL bar and 'w integral fast reactor' and Google will show me the best search of Wikipedia for my query.

I suppose there are ads on the side, too, though I have some tunnelvision on that personally.

Why even bother comparing this...

[Jerajdai]

to Wikipedia? It looks more like about.com to me.

Wikipedia's search is inferior to Google's

[acheron12]

If you don't know the exact name of the article, Googling it is much more likely to bring up relevant and related pages.

"Good" as in "closed minded"

[SuperKendall]

At least Wikipedia has good information then. I don't see the problem.

A monoculture always has great information - you never find anything you disagree with!

That's quality right there.

The real scandal is interested parties cannot edit

[SuperKendall]

Interested parties are by definition subject matter experts, and should be allowed to edit as long as it is clear what they alter.

Wikipedia suffers a major blow to credibility in censoring down almost any article to one side of a story about anything.

That's the point

[SuperKendall]

The expert on this individual? Steve Pantilat. Wonder how many critical edits of Steve Pantilat will make it past the editor.

All of them - because you could write your own article on Steve. You can't edit other people's articles at all.

That means that Steve will not be censored from presenting his own information, as he could well be on Wikipedia...

Any of the following could be true:

[falconwolf]

While Google could have all those problems you list, at least it tries to verify the qualifications of the authors whereas Wiki does not. In both cases, Knol and Wiki, they should only be used as a starting point anyway. I only took a quick look at Knol's front page but I frequently use Wiki, I've post links to wiki articles a bunch of tymes on /. However I also look for other sources of information.

Knol articles have way less references than Wiki ones and rely more on the supposed authority of their authors.

Wiki doesn't even check the qualifications of authors, heck it lets anyone edit articles.

Falcon

A lot isn't even funny, just false

[Moraelin]

No, most of it isn't even a funny hoax, it's just false and one page contradicts the next one. Let me give you just one random example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_legion currently states (scroll down a bit):

Primus pilus: The "first spear" (literal translation) or "first centurion" was the commanding centurion of the first cohort and the senior centurion of the entire legion. This was the highest rank that a career officer could achieve in the 25 years he served. When the primus pilus retired he would most likely gain entry into the equestrian class. He was paid 60 times the base wage.

But if you actually follow the link fo "Primus pilus" you get to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primus_pilus which says:

The Primus Pilus was so called because his own century was in the first file (pilus) of the first cohort (primus). Only eight officers in a fully officered legion outranked the Primus Pilus: The legate (lgtus leginis), commanding the legion; the senior tribune (tribunus laticlavus); the Camp Prefect (praefectus castrorum); and the five junior tribunes (tribn angusticlvi).

Due to similarity between Latin words pilus (file) and pilum, this rank is often incorrectly translated as "first spear centurion".[1]

I'm not even going to get into a debate over which _I_ think is the correct translation. That's not my point. The point is that they contradict each other and can't both be true. One page say X and links to a page which says !X. It's not even the only such pair of pages contradicting each other, _by_ _far_. It's actually quite common.

It's not something funny like San Serife. It's just someone talking out of the butt, and posting incorrect information.

_That_ is my problem with Wikipedia.

Re:A lot isn't even funny, just false

[snowgirl]

No, most of it isn't even a funny hoax, it's just false and one page contradicts the next one. Let me give you just one random example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_legion currently states (scroll down a bit):

Primus pilus: The "first spear" (literal translation) or "first centurion" was the commanding centurion of the first cohort and the senior centurion of the entire legion. This was the highest rank that a career officer could achieve in the 25 years he served. When the primus pilus retired he would most likely gain entry into the equestrian class. He was paid 60 times the base wage.

But if you actually follow the link fo "Primus pilus" you get to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primus_pilus which says:

The Primus Pilus was so called because his own century was in the first file (pilus) of the first cohort (primus). Only eight officers in a fully officered legion outranked the Primus Pilus: The legate (lgtus leginis), commanding the legion; the senior tribune (tribunus laticlavus); the Camp Prefect (praefectus castrorum); and the five junior tribunes (tribn angusticlvi).

Due to similarity between Latin words pilus (file) and pilum, this rank is often incorrectly translated as "first spear centurion".[1]

I'm not even going to get into a debate over which _I_ think is the correct translation. That's not my point. The point is that they contradict each other and can't both be true. One page say X and links to a page which says !X. It's not even the only such pair of pages contradicting each other, _by_ _far_. It's actually quite common.

It's not something funny like San Serife. It's just someone talking out of the butt, and posting incorrect information.

_That_ is my problem with Wikipedia.

But the article for Primus Pilus states 'Due to similarity between Latin words pilus (file) and pilum, this rank is often incorrectly translated as "first spear centurion"' Are we to get on Wikipedia for not snopesing everything?

I picked up an Encyclopedia that one would trust much more than Wikipedia (at least it would be a reasonable source to most people) and it says that Santa Fe is the first permanent settlement of New Mexico. Not true.

Contradictory information is because there are competing ideas arguing points, and an editor will be editing one article but not another (even though they're well related), and thus standards given for one article, are not necessarily met by a different article.

Google's Knol service proving to be a failure.

[Futurepower(R)]

It's amazing to me how quickly Google's Knol service has proven to be a failure. The articles are thinly veiled advertisements. The idea behind Wikipedia now seems even more wise than before.

What will be the URL for Google's Knol

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't go looking for Google's Knol on www.knol.com.