bbgm - the discussion - Latest Comments in Wikipedia meet Google

Re: Wikipedia meet Google

Marian Peters — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 00:20:45 -0000

Actually, "knol" was just the codename for this project.

According to some sources, the actual name is "Unipedia"

Sounds like a better name than "knol".

I quite like the idea that Unipedia will share revenue of any ads with the authors.

Re: Wikipedia meet Google

mndoci — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 09:20:08 -0000

David,

As someone who wears a creative commons shirt twice a week (and has contributed to Wikipedia), you can imagine how much I admire the Wikipedia effort. I don't know the consequences of this entire effort, but you have to admit, this seems to be a counter on Google's part to Jimmy Wales' wiki-based search engine (not Wikipedia per se having slept over it). One could hardly think that they would be going after Mahalo or Squidoo.

Is there room for Wikipedia Knol. Sure. In fact, if Google did not use the CC or similar license, I would continue to favor Wikipedia as a resource and NOT be a contributor. Call's for another blog post

Re: Wikipedia meet Google

David Gerard — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 05:09:22 -0000

Speaking as a Wikipedia editor and Wikimedia Foundation volunteer - The PNG example (http://www.google.com/image... shows a CC-by-3.0 tag. As far as I'm concerned that's a BIG WIN for Wikipedia and what we do - making free content *normal and expected*. If they require contributions to be under a proper free content licence, then I'm a BIG FAN of this endeavour. Same reason Citizendium succeeding would be a big win for what we do - it's not competition, it's expanding the pool of unencumbered knowledge.

Re: Wikipedia meet Google

David Gerard — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 03:39:32 -0000

Speaking as a Wikipedia editor - we're not actually all about running a hugely expensive website with no ads. It's about creating a resource for the future which anyone can take and reuse freely, not just making a cool website today.

It looks like they're bending over backwards not to make this actually freely reusable content. Which, y'know, they could easily do (all editors agree to release their work under GFDL or CC-by-sa or something). So that immediately makes it less interesting to Wikipedia in terms of what we're actually doing. This immediately places Knol with about.com and Scholarpedia. I wonder precisely what rights over other people's work they're going to try to claim.

If the quality of the work is good, we'd probably use it for references, like we do about.com.

Re: Wikipedia meet Google

Neil — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:47:04 -0000

It's interesting, isn't it. Although hard to see it as anything other than an attempt to compete directly with Wikipedia at the moment, as you say.

I don't know that I would contribute to knol - simply because writing long, authoritative articles takes a lot of time. In fact this is where a lot of systems fall down - they rely on substantial contributions and only a tiny fraction of the audience are willing/able to contribute. It takes almost a borderline autism to write long articles and submit them to the ether, unsure if anyone will ever use them. Trust me, I'm a blogger ;)

Perhaps a better approach to "fact checking" is some sort of voting system. Rather like that Google Images site where you're presented with images and assign them tags. Imagine "Google Factoids": present users with statements such as "the earth orbits the sun", vote true or false, get a consensus [1]. Now extend that to bioinformatics: get a broad idea of the users background, then present them with "colicin E9 interacts with TolB" - yes, no, don't know. Count the votes and you have a true wisdom of crowds.

[1] OK, this might only lead to despair at how little people know, but you get the idea :)