Google's Knol, Expert Wiki, Goes Live 263
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.
Re:More of a blog than an encyclopedia (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
It's all about hot, nasty, BA speed... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wikipedia ^ ~Wikipedia (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
s/Wikipedia/about.com/ (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Losing Anonymity? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Losing Anonymity? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Wikipedia is a large stategic threat to Google (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Online Resources (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Losing Anonymity? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
pr0n (Score:1, Interesting)
And now Google is clearly on the
dark side! [google.com]
And this is just a beta! Can you imagine what you will be getting when it's finished!
Licensing (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [google.com] 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.
pay for content? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [davejenkins.com]. 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 [wikindex.com].
Re:not impressed (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Losing Anonymity? (Score:3, Interesting)
"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? (Score:4, Interesting)
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:More of a blog than an encyclopedia (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Losing Anonymity? (Score:2, Interesting)
A friend recently started Dummipedia [dummipedia.org] 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? (Score:3, Interesting)
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? (Score:3, Interesting)
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? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.