4 ms·
How can it be pillaging when the whole point of Wikipedia is that the information in it is free for everyone else to use?
by crocus 18y ago
How can it be pillaging when the whole point of Wikipedia is that the information in it is free for everyone else to use?
- nickb 18y agoProblem is that Google will rank their articles higher than Wikipedia's and will suck the traffic out of Wikipedia and then who will edit Wikipedia?!
- fiaz 18y agoIf this is the case, then it would compromise the credibility of Google search results. I think it's too early to say for certain if Google views Wikipedia as such a huge threat that it would go out of its way to create a new project for the sole purpose of intentionally ranking them higher than Wikipedia. Wikipedia is as much of an icon of the internet as Google. I'm predicting that Knol will go the way of Google Answers for the same reason why Digg remains a stalwart of user generated news - it's the community.
- nickb 18y agoGoogle definitely views Wiipedia as a potential threat. Just look at their SERPs... Wikipedia links are usually in the top 5 on pretty much every factual term.
- Kaizyn 18y agoGoogle does see them a threat ever since the Wiki project founders started work on an open search engine: http://re.search.wikia.com/index.html http://re.search.wikia.com/index.html
- jcl 18y agoWikipedia already makes the information free to use, and other sites freely republish this information (notably answers.com); this doesn't hurt Wikipedia. However, if you set up a Wikipedia clone -- allowing both reading and editing -- it hurts Wikipedia because it "splits the hive mind". If both sites become equally popular, we can expect the number of edits to be divided between them. Since Wikipedia succeeds because of network effects, a Wikipedia with half as many edits becomes less than half as useful. That said, Knol does not appear to be a direct clone of Wikipedia; it emphasizes authorship, it allows multiple people to write on the same topic, and it allows opinion, trivia, irrelevant topics, and all the other things that are against Wikipedia guidelines. It will be interesting to see what role it assumes relative to Wikipedia. I wonder, for instance, how they plan to prevent Knol from turning into the next Geocities?
- unalone 18y agoSimple. They don't let people create terrible 90s-esque designs for a page. Most "amateur content providers" (I remember Geocities mentioning something like that) won't stick around if they can't make it look terrible.