Knol goes live

July 23, 2008 12:38 PM

Knol,Google's single-author answer to Wikipedia, has gone live. Or at least beta. Early beta. While there is a great Knol (defined by Google as "a unit of knowledge") on unclogging a toilet, it still has a way to go, as can be seen by contrasting Wikipedia on Knol and Knol on Wikipedia.
posted by blahblahblah (38 comments total)

tap, tap
posted by kliuless at 12:41 PM on July 23, 2008

Well, the other post doesn't mention Knol that I can see. I guess our favorite giant search engine is doing two things today...
posted by blahblahblah at 12:43 PM on July 23, 2008

Did you know that "knol" backwards is "lonk"?

FACT!
posted by ardgedee at 12:46 PM on July 23, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

What a bunch of dicks.
posted by rusty at 12:54 PM on July 23, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

From Wikipedia:

Knol[1] is a Google project which includes single author articles on topics ranging from "scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions, and also cocks"

*shakes head, rereads*
posted by dobie at 1:11 PM on July 23, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

I like the idea, though I have some doubts about it as Wikipedia-killer.

I'd like it more if it were simply a script that you could add to any page, thus identifying it as a Knol and adding it to the Knol-dex.
posted by roll truck roll at 1:18 PM on July 23, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Hm. If we added "and also cocks" on wikipedia, and correctly linked it to the article I linked above, would they have to let it stand?
posted by rusty at 1:25 PM on July 23, 2008

MetaFilter, I think you need a day off.
posted by Eideteker at 1:45 PM on July 23, 2008

Bah, nothing beats E2.
posted by fordiebianco at 2:15 PM on July 23, 2008

A Knol? Isn't that kind of like a Kobold?
posted by sourwookie at 2:20 PM on July 23, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Well, I wish them luck. I think it's sort of a fool's errand, but if it results in the creation of good, informative pages, great.

I didn't see any information on how the content will be licensed, though. I guess we're to assume that it's All Rights Reserved - Google? That right there would make it markedly less interesting/useful than Wikipedia. (Although to be fair, Wikipedia apparently no longer seems to have as its goal to be a repository of all human knowledge, settling for the significantly less lofty one of just being an editable web encyclopedia. It's a pity the inclusionists seem to have lost there.)
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:35 PM on July 23, 2008

Up 2.1% today, it seems. Oh, wait.

If you add a heävy mëtal ümlaut [wikipedia, knol], you get "Knöl", which is a Swedish word that can mean "bump" or "heel (in the swinish sense)" or "potato" [wikipedia, knol] or "tumor" and probably a few more things.

After this launch, if I type that word into Google and click "I feel lucky", they'll send me to the official Google blog. Oh well.
posted by effbot at 2:43 PM on July 23, 2008

I didn't see any information on how the content will be licensed, though. I guess we're to assume that it's All Rights Reserved - Google?

There's a license box to the right, that happens to say "Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License" on all pages I looked at. One might suspect that it's up to the authors to pick a license (flickr-style).
posted by effbot at 2:47 PM on July 23, 2008

As of this writing, when I search for Knol in Google the Wikipedia entry for Knol comes up before the the link to Knol proper.
posted by Weebot at 3:04 PM on July 23, 2008

The potential for abuse seems huge.

What happens when a creationist is the moderator of the "knol" on evolution? Or a holocaust denier? Or a Republican? Can a corporation moderate its own knol?

But this is Google, so it must be better- with adsense.
posted by T.D. Strange at 3:10 PM on July 23, 2008

What happens when a creationist is the moderator of the "knol" on evolution? Or a holocaust denier? Or a Republican? Can a corporation moderate its own knol?

They can write their own, at least. Or a whole bunch of them.

From the original announcement: "We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing. Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information."

With enough knols, and enough user ranking/traffic patterns to work with, Google assumes that they'll be able to use their machine learning/data mining/statistics wizardry to automatically sort out what's junk and what's not.
posted by effbot at 3:16 PM on July 23, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

It's like Everything2 if it were taken over by the "WE ONLY WRITE FACTUAL NODES" crew, who have long since given up.
posted by mkb at 3:18 PM on July 23, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

It looks a damn sight better than Wikipedia, and that's about all it's got going for it.

Well, that, and no encrustation of byzantine online bureaucracy, [citation required], "this image will shortly be deleted", live-in editor-cum-deletionists, VfD, WP:Anything, unreadable discussion pages, unsigned posts, discussion pages that scream to be in an actual discussion system, overly deep protocol pages, editors squatting their pet projects to ensure their own personal NPoV is the one that stays, and /pauses for breath ...
posted by bonaldi at 4:12 PM on July 23, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

Cancer this, thrombosis that... man, people know stuff about depressing crap.


Metafilter: and also cocks.
posted by pompomtom at 5:06 PM on July 23, 2008

Search Results:
No results found for cocks
Return to: Introduction to Knol
Don't like empty search results? Know something? Write a Knol

Wikipedia? Cocks everywhere, in addition to the ones that bonaldi discusses above.
posted by swell at 6:42 PM on July 23, 2008

I have some doubts about it as Wikipedia-killer

Agreed, Knoll is more like a traditional system with a couple "wisdom of the crowds" add ons. Wikipedia is more disruptive and different, for better and worse:

Wikipedia is expert un-friendly, amateur friendly.
Knoll is expert friendly and amateur friendly.

Wikipedia is community oriented, group work project
Knoll is individual oriented, individual work project

Wikipedia is NPOV
Knoll is NPOV and POV

Wikipedia is a single article for a topic
Knoll is unlimited articles for a topic
posted by stbalbach at 7:21 PM on July 23, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Wikipedia is expert un-friendly

Really?
posted by hifiparasol at 9:25 PM on July 23, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Knol, the word, sucks. Weak fabrication.

Also, it sucks that Google requires a phone number or credit card number to verify contributor names. Trolls.
posted by chance at 10:19 PM on July 23, 2008

hifiparasol: "Wikipedia is expert un-friendly

Really?"

Yes, Really (read the top tag - Matt B was a contributor to the "Really?" article you linked to, before he retired from Wikipedia "utterly frustrated").
posted by stbalbach at 10:47 PM on July 23, 2008

[MOVPE] has become the dominant process for the manufacture of laser diodes, solar cells, LEDs, and also cocks.

It's everywhere!
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 11:44 PM on July 23, 2008

From Google's Knol introduction page:

Knols are indexed by the big search engines, of course. And well-written knols become popular the same as regular web pages. The Knol site allows anyone to write and manage knols through a browser on any computer.

It's Geocities, google-style!
posted by meowzilla at 12:55 AM on July 24, 2008

Search Results:
No results found for superman

Search Results:
No results found for batman

Search Results:
No results found for carbon

Search Results:
No results found for obama

Search Results:
No results found for radiohead

I don't think this is for me
posted by minifigs at 1:59 AM on July 24, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

Why does everyone keep calling this a Wikipedia killer? Wikipedia is going to kill itself.
posted by Cyclopsis Raptor at 2:40 AM on July 24, 2008

o, hai - look! It's the Grassy Knol.
posted by taz at 3:08 AM on July 24, 2008

Wikipedia is not expert-unfriendly; to thrive in it for any amount of time you must become an expert in Wikipedia.
posted by jscott at 3:21 AM on July 24, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

So is this another of Google's "throw it against the wall and see if it sticks" attempts?
posted by PenDevil at 5:45 AM on July 24, 2008

Here's a guess: Wikipedia will eventually own Google, metaphorically speaking. If you think about it, for most users Google is a search engine that returns links to Wikipedia. Perhaps I exaggerate, but you see my point. Search for anything in Google and one of the first few links is going to be to a Wikipedia article. And you know what the most useful link is going to be? The Wikipedia article. Wikipedia organizes the web better than Google, which doesn't really organize it at all. That's because Wikipedia is run by humans, and Google is a fancy machine. Machines are still dumb. In my many experiments, Google has gotten close to answering natural language queries ("Who was Tolstoy?"), but the answer is always "Look at this Wikipedia entry." I'd say in, um, 25 years Wikipedia will be like the phone book and Google will be like an index to phone book (which is to say useless because the phone book is an index).

And then, because there is so much crap on Wikipedia, Citizendium (or some sensible fork of Wikipedia) will take over. That's 50 years away. Authority and "expertism" will be back.
posted by MarshallPoe at 6:52 AM on July 24, 2008

Attention, Earnestly Shameless Self-Promoters: You have more work to do, courtesy of Google.

Uggh.
posted by darth_tedious at 12:32 PM on July 24, 2008

stbalbach, the reason I linked to that particular post is because I had no fucking clue what was going on in it. Perhaps I should have made it more clear that I was taking exception to your "amateur-friendly" description. Though I'm still not really sure what your link was supposed to prove -- that some guy stopped editing Wikipedia because he it was too political? It's still a shitty article, which was my point in the first place. But as I said, I may not have been clear.

General encyclopedias, as I understand them, are supposed to be understandable to reasonably educated people; I actually had a need, at one time, to know more about MOCVD, and tried to use Wikipedia as a resource, but found it utterly useless because the writing was so dense.

Not that I'm really complaining, mind you. It's free, and overall I like Wikipedia. But it's not always amateur-friendly. I'd wager it's not even amateur-friendly most of the time.
posted by hifiparasol at 7:24 PM on July 24, 2008

Wikipedia will eventually own Google, metaphorically speaking.

Yeah, maybe in Soviet Russia.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 7:57 PM on July 24, 2008

It really is true, hifiparasol. Wikipedia hates experts. If you dig through the change histories and talk pages of Wikipedia, you'll find thousands of fights between people with actual expertise and people whose only expertise is in deleting things in Wikipedia. In a lot of cases, you can't even cite non-internet sources, as someone will come along and call your edit vandalism. Listen to this lecture for more on the persecution of experts in Wikipedia.

The fact that that's the article you just happened to link to had background drama is a coincidence, but it's not that amazing of a coincidence statistically.
posted by roll truck roll at 8:18 AM on July 25, 2008

The fact that that's
posted by roll truck roll at 8:21 AM on July 25, 2008

hifiparasol, I was saying amateur/expert from the point of view of the editor, not the reader. For readers, well, I dunno, some topics are just complicated. The job of editors is to have the first section of an article be for "everyman" and then drill down into more complexity further down but that takes skill as a writer, and we are back to the "expert editor unfriendly" argument because Wikipedia is not all that great a place for skilled writers.
posted by stbalbach at 6:55 PM on July 25, 2008