DISQUS

MG Siegler · 1 year ago

Yes, this story is going to explode over the next few days I think. I like how Google seemed to make their official post unnecessarily wordy so as to maybe mask their full intentions. You'll also notice they mention Wikipedia exactly 0 times!

One note: while Google is working with "experts" at first, it seems like anyone will be able to make a page once they open it up. However with their various rating systems in place, no doubt the "expert" pages will float to the top.

And yes, the monetization factor is huge. Imagine how much money Wikipedia would make with just one ad - you can bet Google, which refers millions of visitors to that site, knows full well - and if they recreate a Wikipedia, with the twist of authority and monetization - that they can feature in their own results, they're looking at another huge pool sea of money.

digidave · 1 year ago

I've been waiting for the pro-am approach to wikipedia for a long time. Citizendium is close - but doesn't have the critical mass. If anybody could pull it off, it would be Google.

mathewi · 1 year ago

I agree, Dave.

David Gerard · 1 year ago

Speaking as a Wikipedia editor - we're not actually all about running a hugely expensive website with no ads, and calling Wikipedia "reliant" on Google is a complete misunderstanding of why we do this. 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.

mathewi · 1 year ago

Thanks for the comment, David -- it's good to get the viewpoint of
someone who works with Wikipedia. And I agree that this seems a
little bit like About.com 2.0, but with Google in the driver's seat.
If nothing else, it's going to be interesting to watch.

David Gerard · 1 year ago

Looks like I was dead wrong about their licence - the PNG example (http://www.google.com/images/blogs/knol_lg.png) 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.

Charlie · 1 year ago

I think it will actually complement Wikipedia. Finding high quality, peer-reviewed articles on the web to support Wikipedia articles is currently really hard. If they become a success, knols could become an invaluable reference for Wikipedia articles.

hugh · 1 year ago

one problem is that google is entering into the conflict of interest - as a search engine - that they previously shunned, and helped them become the kings of search.

other engines showed you what they wanted to show you; google showed you what you wanted to find.

as google becomes a content producer, they will, surely, game their search results in their own favour. there's no indication of how they will deal with this yet.

anyway, that's bad for the web, but, i suppose, inevitable.