Tag: knol

Knol

There isn’t much to talk about Knol technology – it is either nicely engineered or missing (they probably thought that search is main tool for collaboration). Of course, many issues are already covered by others, but…

My first look was at the featured articles. What was wrong?

  • It features ‘closed collaboration’. Actually, thats no different from a blog, then…
  • It doesn’t care much about the licensing – featured articles had images with “all rights reserved”, or images taken from Wikipedia, with attribution but without share-alike clause. Also, no share-alike license forbids importing of content from many other places, but as we see it – nobody cares. ;-)
  • It doesn’t care about linking. Google search was based on the web links. Wikipedia was built on top of lots of broken links (oh, and working ones too). And nobody is going to type a Knol URL.
  • It doesn’t seem to have community tools. It just doesn’t.
  • WYSIWYG editing leads to articles without structure, just some text parts bolder than the other.

So for now, it seems to be pure-engineering approach at the problem, without looking at actual work done, social implications or properly respecting copyrights.

One needs community for that. Community helps not only with content, but with style, metadata, organizing, and most of all – ensures that project maintains values and spirit.

Google does encyclopedia: Knol

It is all closed yet, announcement by VP Engineering tells us Google is launching their idea of encyclopedia – looking for people who can write authoritative articles. No words on licensing apart from “we want to disseminate it as widely as possible”, though author-centric view is more what Citizendium, than Wikipedia wants to do.

Ad revenue sharing poses many interesting questions, especially in collaborative effort. As Wikipedia now provides page view statistics, Google (or knollers) may just work on top of the cream pages (by knowing search trends), and have very distorted overall content. Now it is closed, invite only, so we can’t tell anything more. Time will show. Good to know more organizations are believing about aggregating and disseminating knowledge – it is Wikipedia’s mission, and it is nice to have partners. :-) Though of course, there might be some tensions with Search Quality team…