Comments on: Knol goes live

Knol goes live

blahblahblah — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:38:01 -0800

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.

By: kliuless

kliuless — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:41:25 -0800

tap, tap

By: blahblahblah

blahblahblah — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:43:41 -0800

Well, the other post doesn't mention Knol that I can see. I guess our favorite giant search engine is doing two things today...

By: ardgedee

ardgedee — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:46:59 -0800

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

By: rusty

rusty — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:54:35 -0800

What a bunch of dicks.

By: dobie

dobie — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:11:14 -0800

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*

By: roll truck roll

roll truck roll — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:18:11 -0800

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.

By: rusty

rusty — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:25:05 -0800

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?

By: Eideteker

Eideteker — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:45:28 -0800

MetaFilter, I think you need a day off.

By: fordiebianco

fordiebianco — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:15:34 -0800

Bah, nothing beats E2.

By: sourwookie

sourwookie — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:20:22 -0800

A Knol? Isn't that kind of like a Kobold?

By: Kadin2048

Kadin2048 — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:35:32 -0800

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.)

By: effbot

effbot — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:43:39 -0800

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.

By: effbot

effbot — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:47:46 -0800

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).

By: Weebot

Weebot — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:04:21 -0800

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.

By: T.D. Strange

T.D. Strange — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:10:32 -0800

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.

By: effbot

effbot — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:16:37 -0800

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.

By: mkb

mkb — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:18:26 -0800

It's like Everything2 if it were taken over by the "WE ONLY WRITE FACTUAL NODES" crew, who have long since given up.

By: bonaldi

bonaldi — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:12:07 -0800

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 ...

By: pompomtom

pompomtom — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:06:17 -0800

Cancer this, thrombosis that... man, people know stuff about depressing crap. Metafilter: and also cocks.

By: swell

swell — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:42:29 -0800

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.

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:21:43 -0800

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

By: hifiparasol

hifiparasol — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 21:25:26 -0800

Wikipedia is expert un-friendly Really?

By: chance

chance — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:19:57 -0800

Knol, the word, sucks. Weak fabrication. Also, it sucks that Google requires a phone number or credit card number to verify contributor names. Trolls.

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:47:10 -0800

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").

By: fantabulous timewaster

fantabulous timewaster — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 23:44:36 -0800

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

It's everywhere!

By: meowzilla

meowzilla — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:55:27 -0800

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!

By: minifigs

minifigs — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 01:59:58 -0800

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

By: Cyclopsis Raptor

Cyclopsis Raptor — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 02:40:44 -0800

Why does everyone keep calling this a Wikipedia killer? Wikipedia is going to kill itself.

By: taz

taz — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 03:08:33 -0800

o, hai - look! It's the Grassy Knol.

By: jscott

jscott — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 03:21:11 -0800

Wikipedia is not expert-unfriendly; to thrive in it for any amount of time you must become an expert in Wikipedia.

By: PenDevil

PenDevil — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 05:45:24 -0800

So is this another of Google's "throw it against the wall and see if it sticks" attempts?

By: MarshallPoe

MarshallPoe — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:52:27 -0800

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.

By: darth_tedious

darth_tedious — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:32:04 -0800

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

By: hifiparasol

hifiparasol — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 19:24:29 -0800

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.

By: Civil_Disobedient

Civil_Disobedient — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 19:57:16 -0800

Wikipedia will eventually own Google, metaphorically speaking. Yeah, maybe in Soviet Russia.

By: roll truck roll

roll truck roll — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:18:04 -0800

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.

By: roll truck roll

roll truck roll — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:21:35 -0800

The fact that ~~that's~~

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 18:55:01 -0800

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.