December 17, 2007
Can Google's New Open Encyclopedia Best Wikipedia?
On Wikipedia, you never really know who wrote the article you’re reading. Some are written by experts, but others are written by people with time on their hands who may or may not know what they’re talking about. Actually, most Wikipedia articles are written by a combination of the two. But Google’s new Web encyclopedia, announced last week, will put the authors of articles front and center, so you’ll always know who is talking and what their qualifications are.
The question is, which model will produce a better quick-reference guide?
Daniel Colman, director and associate dean of Stanford University’s continuing-studies program and author of the blog OpenCulture, picks Wikipedia to win this face off. He thinks that Google’s planned encyclopedia will have a hard time attracting experts to write articles, whereas Wikipedia works by letting everyone write articles that are then often corrected by experts.
“Take my word for it,” writes Mr. Colman. “I’ve spent the past five years trying to get scholars from elite universities, including Stanford, to bring their ideas to the outside world, and it’s often not their first priority. They just have too many other things competing for their time.”
Others have pointed out that Google’s project, called knol, is similar to other efforts to create authoritative topic pages, like Squidoo.
There is at least one key factor in Google’s favor though. Knol authors stand to make money for their efforts.
“At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads,” Google’s Udi Manber, said in a statement announcing the service. “If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.”
Those ad dollars would be more than professors make for writing journal articles, which are usually written for no compensation at all. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Monday December 17, 2007 | Permalink |Comments
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MyWikiBiz.com has already been doing what Google Knol intends to do, except that authors on MyWikiBiz get to keep ALL of the ad revenue from their contributions’ Google AdSense ads, not just a “portion” of the money.
— Gregory Kohs Dec 17, 01:24 PM #
It’s hard to beat Wikipedia as a compendium of popular culture, since it’s written by a populist community that revels in popular culture.
But when it comes to scholarly subjects, Wikipedia suffers from a juvenile culture that is hostile to the academic model.
Authoritative subject matter experts are unwelcome on Wikipedia, where the dominant players eschew conscientious scholarship in favor of drama, controversy, and gaming the system for fun and profit.
— Barry Kort Dec 17, 01:51 PM #
I was under the impression that knol is supposed to be more of a complement to rather than a replacement of Wikipedia. Where Wikipedia is stringent that all information be strongly fact based and little opinion, I understood Google’s Knol is supposed to be more opinion based.
— Eliot Dec 17, 03:57 PM #
The notion that “Wikipedia works by letting everyone write articles that are then often corrected by experts” is sadly out of keeping with the realitry of Wikipedia, where articles created by knowledgeable authors are more likely to be degraded over time by hordes of inept users and power-tripping administrators who neither know nor care anything about the subject matters in question.
— Jon Awbrey Dec 18, 12:39 AM #
And Google will actually check the identities and qualifications of all their authors? :-)
Let’s not kid ourselves. In their own announcement, Google has announced that they would not be “editors” in the usual sense – they will not select content or authors.
What, therefore, can prevent any doofus from claiming to be, say, a history professor expert on WWII, and talk about it as an authority?
So, essentially, this Knol project is a collection of encyclopedic-oriented blogs, with no additional quality control.
I prefer the principle of Wikipedia (which openly acknowledges it does not check contributions) to a project that proposes authors’ profiles that undergo no check.
— Dex Dec 18, 04:06 AM #
Dex’ comment on checking author identity reflects my own concerns.
With Wikipedia, the very fact that the authors are less highlighted—and the fact that payment is not involved—can be seen as a sort of protection.
The names, titles, degrees, and usually even photos of many top-notch academics are readily available on the web. What’s to stop John Doe Junior from stealing an expert’s name and mugshot and slapping them on a cruddy article in order to earn the advertising revenue, meanwhile duping users with supposedly “expert” information—and possibly damaging the real expert’s reputation?
The discussion of knols on Google’s blog notes that books and articles have bylines—but they fail to mention that books and articles also have editors who verify those bylines, even if they don’t fact-check every detail of the content. Google’s encyclopedia wants to highlight the authors and yet cannot offer any confirmation that an author even is who he or she claims to be.
— Erin Dec 18, 09:59 AM #
I’ve speculated about the possibility of Knols being more accepted in a blog entry comparing and contrasting Knol with Wikipedia and other similar services. According to the initial description of the service, the articles will be by named authors with a surrounding infrastructure of social networking tools that allows for commentary on the article but doesn’t allow the article to be changed. One of the key aspects of this approach to determining the veracity of the article would seem to be the amount of social participation surrounding the article. A danger would seem to be the possibility of dilution of usefulness for a particular topic if many authors create entries on the same topic and there isn’t enough review and commentary by others to determine the leading article.
— Peter Murray Dec 18, 10:15 AM #
The traditional paper world of publishing, enhanced a century ago with the publishing of movies and later videos, had a model of ownership and how to profit from ownership. The new web world has invited collaborative modes of joint authorship, ownership that is a mess between ads, a site managing company, a software provider, and many bad-minded people driving out good currency with bad. Early Italian government experiments with electronic democracy demonstrated vividly the ability of bad contributors to drive non-strident non-mentally-ill contributors away—only the loudest and least sensitive persons were left on the Italian system at its demise. The incentive for top scholars is at present merely this—citations of electronically available full articles are approximately 11 times the number of traditionally paper published articles. Other scholars do web searches then hit high cost web-available article sites and libraries of paper journals second. Upping citations of your work directly impacts tenure, salary, and other academic wants. The addition of tiny fragments of uncertain amounts of money is more likely to attract bad minded phonies rather than top notch scholars.
The really new dimension is perhaps not hit right by Google’s current Knol idea, but a near miss to it—namely, the venue in which scholars can publish less-than-journal-articles and more-than-opinion-piece articles, namely again, synthesis, grounding, application, comparison, categorical, and other forms of thought forbidden and scoured entirely out of current journals. All the top scholars I know have oodles of “almost” stuff of high value but forbidden in current venues of publishing for anal erotic, national neurosis, or monkey male competitiveness mania reasons (or some such stuff). They do not throw it away because they refer to it themselves, use it with undergrad and grad students, and occasionally whip pieces of it into anal erotic enough shape to pass muster with current paper journals. A venue is needed, Google may or may not have got it right in feature terms. We will see who and what gets attracted by Google’s deal— the lack of official recognition of the citation aspect of all this, in Google’s descriptions and announcements indicates a good bit of ignorance of scholar-customer needs in Google’ s teams and management—technology push arrogance of the usual male hormone monkey hierarchy sort.
— Richard Tabor Greene Dec 18, 11:24 AM #