This is huge news. Google tonight decided to disclose on their blog a new project of their's known as 'Knol' that is the early stages of testing. According to them, 'knol' stands for "unit of knowledge" and though their description is wordy, it appears very obvious what they are trying to create: a "Pro" or perhaps more accurate, an "Accountable" version of Wikipedia that will be monetized and be featured in Google Search results.Google has invited a few select individuals who are knowledgeable in a various topic to write a page for them about it - but it will eventually be open to anyone. One of the big differences between Knol and Wikipedia is that the pages' authors will be highlighted just as an author of a book would be. This aims to not only give them credit for their work, but also to hold them accountable for it. If a page is amiss, anyone is free to create a new one to compete against it. User comments, ratings, and reviews will all help determine which page is the best for a subject.
Most people know full well that the greatest strength of Wikipedia is also its greatest weakness: that anyone can edit it at any time. While there seems to be an army of users who patrol the site looking for questionable edits, the fact remains that at any time I could simply go to say, Osama bin Laden's page, and write he was killed in 2004 by He-Man. The whole world could then see that until it was corrected. With Knol, pulling such a stunt would destroy my reputation - at least that seems to be the idea.
Wikipedia's other big weakness? It's reliance on Google. Wikipedia gets a massive amount of traffic from Google searches - in fact it's the 3rd most popular site in terms of Google downstream traffic. If Google suddenly starts highlighting their Knol service over Wikipedia - which they certainly make it sound like they intend to do - Wikipedia's traffic could really plummet.
Google obviously is not stupid. They saw all the traffic going to Wikipedia from their searches and likely thought: "why don't we make our own"? The question would be why, when Wikipedia is already so firmly established and doing seemingly good work, the kind Google seems to love so much? Well because if you read closely, authors will have the option to put Google Ads on their pages. Cha-ching.
Quite a few people have talked about monetizing Wikipedia in the past - if they had just one banner ad they would make a lot, and I mean A LOT, of money from it - but Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has steadfastly refused this. Most people love that, they see no ads on Wikipedia and think it's great - who would want a Wikipedia with ads? Well someone also getting paid by those ads probably would. Yes, Google wants to have revenue sharing with Knol page authors.
Google is setting out to create an monetizable, accountable version of Wikipedia - one that would aim to replace Wikipedia as the authoritative source of information on the Internet. To say this is huge is an understatement.
They mention Wikipedia exactly ZERO times in their post.
MORE:
Marshall Kirkpatrick calls this a "game changer" on Read/WriteWeb.
Nick Carr: "For the past year, Chief Wikipedian Jimmy Wales has been doing a lot of trash-talking about taking on Google in the search business. Now Google's striking back."
7 comments:
Question: where did you get the rev-share bit from? None of the things I read mentioned a rev-share model. That's one of my big problems with the system.
In the main google blog post 4th paragraph from the bottom:
"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 made that post extremely wordy - and I think intentionally. They don't want to yell out their trying to create a monetized Wikipedia killer...
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.
If the quality of the work is good, we'd probably use it for references, like we do about.com.
@david - perhaps "reliance" was a poor choice of words. I - like most people - love Wikipedia and really do appreciate the efforts to keep it outside the influence of advertisers and the goal of creating something for the greater good. I'm simply remarking on the possible ramifications for the web community at large when someone like Google come directly into your realm - I know you that they are going for something more akin to about.com or scholarpedia, but I think as this plays out time will show they are aiming much larger.
That's not to say they will kill Wikipedia, I never explicitly said that nor do I think that will happen, but I think it's a fair assessment to say that if Google is successful here, Wikipedia's pageviews will take a big hit - which you guys shouldn't really care about anyway.
As for being freely reusable, Google did say this:
"We do not want to build a walled garden of content; we want to disseminate it as widely as possible. Google will not ask for any exclusivity on any of this content and will make that content available to any other search engine."
Their example picture also indicates pages will be under CC.
Appreciate the comment, always good to get both sides.
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.
@david - that's great, if everyone can work together like you suggest the only winner will be all of us.
We don't even have to work together - we could be at each others' throats and it'd still be a win if we're at each others' throats under a proper free content licence ;-)
(By "proper" I mean something like freedomdefined.org - freedom to use, freedom to apply, freedom to modify, freedom to redistribute, all for any purpose. That's the definition the Wikimedia Foundation endorses, not a little because it was written by WMF board member Erik Moeller with Wikimedia projects in mind ;-)
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