Google’s Knol: No Wikipedia Killer (Yet)

One of the reasons I like blogs is that they are written by individuals: at least the good ones are. A specific perspective on some issue is presented, without the necessity for a review or editorial process, except for whatever the author wants to impose on his or her self.

This is also one of the reasons that I don’t really groove on wikis: they are a collectivized, blendo kind of medium, where individual voice is ablated by the passage on many hands on many keyboards. While the result is interesting, it is seldom as clean or clear as the insights of an individual. I am not spitting on collective intelligence, note: just the wiki medium as the way to get there.

Google’s newly announced knol is a direct assault on the collective encyclopedia model embedded in Wikipedia, and seems to be based, at least in part, on the same notions as my love for blogs and dislike for wikis.

[from Official Google Blog: Encouraging people to contribute knowledge by Udi Manber]

[…]

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.

A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.

Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

The lack of individual authority in Wikipedia, and the corresponding tyranny of the bureaucratic infighting around what is and is not true, is a problem that Google wants to counter in a Googlesque way: the most authorative authors of knols — the articles that will comprise the knol system — will get compensated by advertising revenue. Authority will be directly translated into cash, in a nearly frictionless knowledge marketplace, in the Google worldview, it seems.

Aside from implicitly challenging the primacy of the Wikipedia approach to amassing all the world’s knowledge, Google has shot a fire arrow directly into the dreams of offerings like Squidoo and Mahalo, which attempt — without Google’s stature and search dominance — to attract authors and indexers to make sense of the world for a fee, as well. But if you are going to write that authoritative post on social software or ancient Egyptian pornography, where do you think you’ll get more traffic?

A second aspect of this announcement is the Google notion of “community tools”, which are of the sort that support individual voice: comments, reviews, ratings. Not the ‘surrender to the borg’ tools of Wikipedia, where everyone can argue behind the scenes about what should or should not be included in the entry on Pork Bellies, but those arguments are not on the page, directly, and the process — and its cadre of editors — hold sway over the eventual content.

So Google is attempting to rejigger the fabric of the Web, and — depending on your view — to either correct a fundamental error in how knowledge is collected, found, evaluated, and distributed, or to undermine the encyclopedianist vision of Jimbo Wales and the Wikipedia minions.

The jury is out, but I hold in the social media vision best embodied by the blogosphere, where individual voices meet in a community framed by open discourse and open disagreement, not back-room politicking leading to a consensus realized in a Wikipedia entry.

Prior to Google stepping forward, no one with any real oomph has tried to challenge the Wikipedia orthodoxy.

Not that my participation will make a whit of difference, but I haven’t spent any time crafting paragraphs in Wikipedia. However, I would certainly be interested in writing a few knols, that’s for sure. And clearly, for knol to take off, a whole lot of people will have to feel the same.

Nick Carr concurs that this authorship dimension is the heart of the Google chalenge:

[from Google Knol takes aim at Wikipedia by Nick Carr]

The big distinction with Wikipedia is that Knol relies on individual authors rather than “the crowd.” Each article, or “knol,” will be signed and owned by the person who writes it, and articles on the same subject will compete with one another for viewer’s eyes. In contrast, Wikipedia builds a single version of each article in a communal way with many edits by anonymous contributors.

A number of other thinkers I admire (Paul Kedrotsky, Matthew Ingram, etc.) see the economics of knol as potentially very destabilizing.

Umair Haque believes that Google’s DNA will stop this project from really creating or serving a community, and therefore it will not challenge Wikipedia at all.

[from The Economics of Community, or How to pwn Google]

Udi thinks the problem is:

“…But not everything is written nor is everything well organized to make it easily discoverable.”

Actually - that’s the solution.

Because communities are deeply messy places: that’s a deep part of how they create value. Denim lovers will never talk about, for example, their favorite jeans, in ways that will be “easily discoverable” - because the more you love something, the harder it is to fit your relationship with it into an algorithmically predetermined box.

In this messiness, funnily enough, they’re not so different from markets. But where Google can harness the messiness of markets - it sees only disorder and chaos in communities.

That’s unfortunate.

Because unless knol is a (true) market, network, or community - it stands absolutely no chance of competing with Wikipedia. It’s economics are almost totally dominated - if not totally nonexistent.

Hmmm. I disagree. There is a large web world out here, with gazillions of people — like me — who are disinclined to play in the Wikipedia sandpile. While I agree that things can be messy, I don’t think that the messiness of our understanding of the world is an implediment to Google’s idea here. All that is necessary is people willing to author snippets within knol, and for others to read and rate them. That’s the core dynamic of all social media-based activities on the web. Google is the just the first to be in a position to be able to make a credible effort to blogify human knowledge, just as Wikipedia has been working to wikify it.

I vote for blogifying, instead of wikifying.

Perhaps its going to turn out to be a fundamental split in human nature, like extroverts and introverts? Perhaps there’s a place in the world for both models to work?