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3 reasons why Wikipedia will kick Knol's Ass. [0] => No ads and it is clean. It is made by people who don't intend to make money, created by people whose world

by azharcs 18y ago

3 reasons why Wikipedia will kick Knol's Ass. [0] => No ads and it is clean. It is made by people who don't intend to make money, created by people whose world don't revolve around money and read by people who value knowledge more than money. [1] => Wikipedia is millions of pages ahead of Google Knol when it comes to content. 7 million pages in 200 languages. Money can't buy you that. [2] => Wikipedia is synonymous with knowledge but with Google Knol, only the first four letters match, that is the closest it comes to knowledge. I can go on, but will stop here. This is Google's narrow minded way of making money by showing more ads. They clearly were directing lot of traffic to Wikipedia pages, they realized why direct the traffic to some other site when we can let users steal content from Wikipedia and show it in Knol.

mechanical_fish 18y ago
Here's a few more: - Knol articles aren't CC-licensed by default. So not only can't people log in and update them (a facility which, arguably, makes Wikipedia a bit too dynamic) but they can't even clone them under their own byline and make fixes. The result is going to be a bunch of sad-looking abandoned articles, like the dregs of About.com. Say what you will about Wikipedia: The thing is often up-to-date within minutes. - If, indeed, Knol gets favorable treatment in PageRank -- even if its advantage is only slight -- people will soon figure out that it's more profitable to dump 10,000 crappy articles on Knol than to craft one perfect article and keep it updated. The ads will show up anyway. Heck, it might be more profitable to put up a page with poor content and a bunch of ads -- that way frustrated readers will click through on the ads to escape. That's how domain squatting works. We can certainly look forward to seeing just about every Wikipedia article mirrored on Knol. The software to do that is being written right now; maybe it has already been written. Interestingly, sites filled with ads used to do that to get a lot of PageRank, but I haven't seen any of those sites on a Google search recently. I guess that might change now that Google's getting into the linkjacking business.
Create 18y ago
Look at King Jimmy's bag collection. It will tell you, that GOOG is behind Wikipedia, somewhat like Firefox, but maybe not as completely having sold out. It made GOOG business sense to assist in generating valuable content on the internet, which attracts eyeballs and gives reason to surf at all. Since then, they must have figured out, that it would be much better, if they could own the net completely. At least they are trying ;) Until you cannot dump Knol and modify it at will, it will be never free, hence it will never compete with wikipedia (which ironically is shooting itself in the leg, giving room for and old-new wikipedia).
vaksel 18y ago
there is only one reason it'll beat knol...EVERYONE knows that wikipedia is where you go for info on the web. Most people now don't search for "______", they now search for "_____ wiki" to avoid the ad infested sites. Knol is just another case of Google copy pasting other people's products, w/o real care if it succeeds or not. If it does? GREAT! If it doesn't? Well at least we managed to get 20,000,000 page views and got us $500,000 more in ad revenue
- maien 18y ago
  exactly. Now when people are confused about something, they will go to wiki for validation, even they know it is not 100%. but people do trust it. If google is able to change the habit to 'xxxx knol', i think google can do anything on the web.
chaostheory 18y ago
to add to the reasons why wikipedia will stay king - couldn't wikipedia just cite knol when it needs to?
marijn 18y ago
Has anyone tried to create an actual 'Knol' yet? I did, and the experience was less than smooth... in fact I gave up. Editing a big article is not only slow, but will cause stack overflows in JavaScript, making it impossible to save your work. Then the thing froze again for a few minutes, after which it informed me that 512k is the maximum size for an article. Of course, in typical Google style, there's no real feedback form, just some 'help' page [1] where you can react, but which seems to be completely ignored by the Google staff. Oh, and the 'confirm name' feature works only for US citizens. Which is probably no big loss, since it mostly looks like a lame excuse to gather even more data about us. But (though I can't confirm this first hand) someone blogged that your Knols only show up on the actual site if you confirm your name. I'm appalled. [1] https://knol.google.com/k/knol/knol/Help https://knol.google.com/k/knol/knol/Help -- Take a look at the enraged comments, it's amusing.

by azharcs 18y ago

mechanical_fish 18y ago

Here's a few more: - Knol articles aren't CC-licensed by default. So not only can't people log in and update them (a facility which, arguably, makes Wikipedia a bit too dynamic) but they can't even clone them under their own byline and make fixes. The result is going to be a bunch of sad-looking abandoned articles, like the dregs of About.com. Say what you will about Wikipedia: The thing is often up-to-date within minutes. - If, indeed, Knol gets favorable treatment in PageRank -- even if its advantage is only slight -- people will soon figure out that it's more profitable to dump 10,000 crappy articles on Knol than to craft one perfect article and keep it updated. The ads will show up anyway. Heck, it might be more profitable to put up a page with poor content and a bunch of ads -- that way frustrated readers will click through on the ads to escape. That's how domain squatting works. We can certainly look forward to seeing just about every Wikipedia article mirrored on Knol. The software to do that is being written right now; maybe it has already been written. Interestingly, sites filled with ads used to do that to get a lot of PageRank, but I haven't seen any of those sites on a Google search recently. I guess that might change now that Google's getting into the linkjacking business.

Create 18y ago

Look at King Jimmy's bag collection. It will tell you, that GOOG is behind Wikipedia, somewhat like Firefox, but maybe not as completely having sold out. It made GOOG business sense to assist in generating valuable content on the internet, which attracts eyeballs and gives reason to surf at all. Since then, they must have figured out, that it would be much better, if they could own the net completely. At least they are trying ;) Until you cannot dump Knol and modify it at will, it will be never free, hence it will never compete with wikipedia (which ironically is shooting itself in the leg, giving room for and old-new wikipedia).

vaksel 18y ago

there is only one reason it'll beat knol...EVERYONE knows that wikipedia is where you go for info on the web. Most people now don't search for "______", they now search for "_____ wiki" to avoid the ad infested sites. Knol is just another case of Google copy pasting other people's products, w/o real care if it succeeds or not. If it does? GREAT! If it doesn't? Well at least we managed to get 20,000,000 page views and got us $500,000 more in ad revenue

maien 18y ago
exactly. Now when people are confused about something, they will go to wiki for validation, even they know it is not 100%. but people do trust it. If google is able to change the habit to 'xxxx knol', i think google can do anything on the web.

chaostheory 18y ago

to add to the reasons why wikipedia will stay king - couldn't wikipedia just cite knol when it needs to?

marijn 18y ago

Has anyone tried to create an actual 'Knol' yet? I did, and the experience was less than smooth... in fact I gave up. Editing a big article is not only slow, but will cause stack overflows in JavaScript, making it impossible to save your work. Then the thing froze again for a few minutes, after which it informed me that 512k is the maximum size for an article. Of course, in typical Google style, there's no real feedback form, just some 'help' page [1] where you can react, but which seems to be completely ignored by the Google staff. Oh, and the 'confirm name' feature works only for US citizens. Which is probably no big loss, since it mostly looks like a lame excuse to gather even more data about us. But (though I can't confirm this first hand) someone blogged that your Knols only show up on the actual site if you confirm your name. I'm appalled. [1] https://knol.google.com/k/knol/knol/Help https://knol.google.com/k/knol/knol/Help -- Take a look at the enraged comments, it's amusing.