Google Launches Encyclopedia Project Knols
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | December 14, 2007 | Share This
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Google launched a project yesterday that will merge the authority of traditional encyclopedias with some of the social aspects of crowd-powered Wikipedia. Dubbed “Knols,” (a “knol” stands for unit of knowledge and is what each article is called) the project emphasizes the authority of its writers in each subject, arguably lending it more credibility than Wikipedia. It will also feature social features such as reader-submitted ranking, commenting, and peer reviews, but Google says they will not have any hand in editing and that authors will own their pages. In fact, they’ll also have the chance to add ads to their pages. The project is not yet live and is currently invite-only but it seems that soon anyone can write; as a preliminary example, Google has provided a knol about insomia from a Stanford sleep expert.
Clearly, the encyclopedic scope of this project is drawing a lot of comparisons to Wikipedia. Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion thinks Knols will kill Wikipedia, partly because of Google’s resources and its emphasis on authoritative writers, and Wired counters that it won’t because the encyclopedias differ over the fundamental question of collective vs. individual authority, and people will still look to Wikipedia.
There’s one other large-scale knowledge project that may need to worry, though, and that’s the NY Times-owned About.com. Written by “guides,” who are compensated for their writing based on page views, About.com doesn’t have any real social checks-and-balances; the most interaction or input users can make is in comments. I predict that over time, Google’s knols will supercede About.com’s articles in number and quality, and the ability to support one’s writing with ads via knols will be as attractive to subject experts as the page views-based compensation of About.com.
Google’s first foray into content publishing (if you don’t count its acquisition of Blogger several years ago), happened in early September, when its aggregation service Google News penned a deal with several news wires to host and link to their stories directly, displacing the online newspapers that ran the wires’ syndicated content. The knols project is also another example of the convergence of search, social media, and content, as Mahalo Social did earlier this week.
Topics: Google, Social Media, Wikipedia |
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The knols project leans too far to a limited number of experts on a wide variety of subjects. Wikipedia has the huge advantage of continuous challenge to the content of articles.
In effect, it would be better for Google to find a way to contribute positively to Wikipedia than to make a parallel universe.
Tying Google search, maps, Earth and Wikipedia/ Wiktionary together in a more integrated fashion is a no brainer for open information on a broad range of topics.