I'm starting a thread outside of the "News" forum, since I think this is a very big topic, and it will be discussed for years to come.

My first impression is that Google Knol is awesome. Name verification is performed either through credit card or telephone directory look-up and call. All kinds of options for collaboration levels and licensing. Ability to make some ad revenues. Very flashy and easy-to-use interface. And social "ranking" of results, like Wikia Search. Look out, Jimbo, I smell toast burning!

This will easily beat Wikipedia Review (except for those editors looking for 100% lifetime advertising revenues), and it certainly stands a chance to do major damage to Wikipedia.

Give it a try, everyone, and let us know what are your first impressions.

I will indeed. The first stuff that goes in from me will be the expert stuff I know that Wikipedia fought me on. As pure revenge.

The options for real-name verification give me a big case of the . WP fought me on those also, for years. The main arguments being: (1) But what if somebody harrasses me? A. Well, what if they do? I'm sure there are some houses available with 1950's fallout shelters near them, but I don't want to live that way myself. You have a million chances to be harrassed by your real name in your real life, assuming you ever leave your house. Which you may not.

The second argument was (2) "But this will be discriminatoooooory. inasmuch as those Third World kids with a web-enabled hand-cranked cellphone but no name in a phonebook and no credit card and no bank account, won't be able to eeeeeeeedit. (Whine).

Okay, can I see a show of hands from those who doubt that before long, these imaginary kids are tossed by the wayside, as Knol gains on WP? It never was about them. Like everything else about the power structure at WP, these kids served only as a convenient excuse.

On to the Grassy Knol!

From looking at this, it's not an encyclopedia, or more of a directory that Wikipedia Review is. It seems to be almost a free web host for simple bits of information, how-tos, knowledge, and lore.

Totally different game...

Well, once Knol is able to stand on its own two feet, it will have a distinct advantage over Wikipedia in that Goggle will surely ensure a searcher goes to Knol over Wikipedia. And as Google is one of the primary access points of Wikipedia, this will probably have a noticeable influence on our readership.

Wikipedia is over. Knol blows it away completely.

It's easy and with Google behind it, it's going to be unbeatable.

Check and mate. Sorry Jimbo, but this is it....

I'm completely unimpressed by Google Knol.

One of the strengths of Wikipedia is the presentation via MediaWiki. Google have missed a trick by not presenting the Knols better.

Hmm, I was able to start a Knol by logging in to my google account, even though it has no identifying information. I didn't try saving though.

If it's not an encyclopedia, it wont waste human overhead on trying to delete "fancruft"--which is ironically the thing Wikipedia is best at. Fans tend to collaborate and edit out of a pure love for the subject, not edit war. I guess fancruft authors will find a welcoming new home, along with Wikipedia's disenchanted experts.

Dropping the "encyclopedia" pretension could only be an asset, not a liability. Now we'll find out whether named experts really can beat pseudonymous mobs.

Even if it never displaces Wikipedia, Knol will put competitive pressure on the Wikipedia community to attract and retain the best editors (who are probably not fond of arguing with mindless sock puppets). I hope that happens, rather than Wikipedia folding into a fringe site for copyleft purists and non-Brandtian-anti-Googleans.

I think it's a good day for everyone here, except possibly Daniel Brandt.

But think of the administrators! What administrative work can the Wikipedian administrators do on Knol?

I can see where this is going. Once experts, like doctors, get into the act on Knol, then all what Google has to do to make it totally awesome is to cross-reference between Google Health and the Google Knol experts.

It may be a puncture wound to Wikipedia, but it certainly takes a stab at and draws blood from the private government-subsidized health care agencies. Google is more interested in the health care aspect then the encyclopedia.

Oh look, shiny! -- Medpedia

Heheheheheh. One expects a Department Chairman for a college within a university to be a subject matter expert (SME). If not the world's authority, at least somebody with a Ph.D. in the subject (or something closely related) and a decent CV. The idea that a generic "administrator" can administrate any kind of business went out a long time ago (I hope). Of course, the *&%$s keep creeping back. Keep them out and you get Project Apollo. Let them back in and you get the Challenger disaster where the engineers said "whoa" and the (by then) politicized NASA administrators said "go."

To the extent that business managers still creep into other enterprises, it's places where they are actually accountants of a kind, and the problems involve spreadsheets and money (which is what happened at NASA, of course, once the moon had been reached and NASA ceased to be a cost-plus run place). Which is fine, but that's not Knol's problem. There is very little place for that kind of a accounting person there, other than where they already work on infrastructure, for Google. What's the marginal cost of this kind of undertaking, if you're already Google and have half a million servers? My guess is that it's shockingly small, and what there is, is already handled by the Google and Adsense beancounters.

There might be some social wars on Knol, now that money and prestige is involved, over staking out "mining rights" to topics. I mean, do we give all the income to the first person to "stake out" the articles on the United States and Adolf Hitler? Perhaps administration of a kind will be necessary to resolve those wars. Some combination of credentials, work output/product, and first-come-first-dibs is going to have to be decided. I can't imagine that it has, yet. So this is not a simple problem. However, SME's are still going to be needed for every academic topic. And even for non academic topics, if money is involved. Of course, it may be hard to convince anybody that you're a world expert on James T. Kirk.

Even cruft may make money. This is even worse news for Wikia, where they have almost the Knol model already, but (as far as I can tell) abuse their contributors more than Knol will. Hehehehehe.

It seems the creater of an article gets to control its content. If someone does not like that they are allowed to create another article on the identical topic. It is not clear that an administrator or a SME in such a system would have anything to do.

I like it already. It does seem to be much better geared towards accountability, expertise and knowledge.

If there are going to be fan parties and critic parties on Knol I imagine it will be easier for readers to determine who emphasizes what. I'm not sure how any fan can get around that. Perhaps by posing as a critic, getting critic votes, then changing the article to fandom?

If there are any cosmetic problems with it, they can be fixed easily.

Doc

Decide whose article comes up first on searches? Maybe it would be done with a Google link-vote method? Er, that's starting to feel like ArXive and PUBMED and history journal articles showing up on Google Scholar. We already have reviews for a lot of fields and subjects online, but there's no point in reinventing Google for Google. In particular, there's no point in using a Wiki-documents-like system if you're not going to have collaboration on writing. That's what Wikis are FOR. But if you do have collaboration, then you need to parcel out credit to many contributors, by fraction of verbiage or something. Not sure this has ever been done! Perhaps time for me to explore Citizendium to see if they've solved this. Anybody here know offhand what they do?

I believe on Citizendium you can edit any old thing but whatever they call their SMEs (I forget) get veto power if they think 'anyone' is wrong, and if that gets to a conflict the admins mediate it out somehow.



I think Wikia is in more trouble than Wikipedia/WMF because of Knol, to be honest. Knol is one person getting to totally own a given Wikipedia article. The fiscal aspect is where this will win over Wikia.

Do owners of Wikia wikis get a cut of the ad revenue? If the answer is no/not all, then Wikia is potentially fubar here.

I hope the few wikis I dig that moved over to Wikia are able to potentially pull out...

Any bets on how long it's going to be "beta"? I call the year 2031.

Here are some of the policies.

http://knol.google.com/k/knol-help/content...i57lahl1w25/13#

FT2 will be so disappointed

I just hope they follow through on the policies properly

Doc

Users may not publish written, image, audio or video content that promotes pedophilia, incest and bestiality.

FT2 and Erik will probably go right ahead and publish, on the grounds that Google said "and", not "or".



I am verified and publishing (mostly re-factored content from my old pre-blog-era newsletter, American Cynic). I'll keep everyone posted on my AdSense profits, which will need to be approved (may take 2 weeks). I figure an early set of about 20 articles should be a good test to see what's possible with this site, from a financial perspective.

Greg

I have done some editing on Citizendium. SMEs can control content in any way they see fit. There really isn't any mediation the SME wins all disputes. The failing of Citizendium is that SMEs can still be socially dysfunctional jerks who want all articles to be written according to their POV.

I've just been over to Knol. There are no SMEs but the creator of any Wiki there essentially owns it, and gets all the Adsense income that comes from it. Others can edit a draft version, but the original creator is God-King of their own Wiki and decides to promote any edits by others, or not. As for subjects, if you're the only creator of a Knol-Wiki on your subject, you're it. Others who want their own Wikis but don't want to edit on one "owned" by you, simply create their own with the same name. A Google-like vote scheme then votes on the best Knol-wikis with the same name, and puts the leading ones up front, on searches. And they get the ad bucks (you can flag any article you create for ads or no ads).

So you can predict (say) hundreds of versions of "United States" or "Adolf Hitler," all owed by the original startup authors of each of them, and all competing for ads on that subject. But right now, there aren't any! (no doubt this will change).

It's weird from the WP perspective, but we'll see how it works out. Incidentally a friend just told me tried to delete his profile from WP with a note to redirect to Knol, and was told automatically that this was disallowed because it was "destructive." For sure.

So far as I can tell, there is absolutely nothing to keep you from copying stuff out of Wikipedia to your own Wiki on Knol, and making Adsense money from it, as though it were Wikia. Of course, others will follow you, but this pretty much guarantees that anything on Wikipedia will eventually show up on privately "owned" version on Knol, making money for the owners of them and for Google. That can't be done for stuff on Wikia, which is under a different licence, but that stuff will be duplicated by "look and feel" articles with the same information and cites, but different locally-written personal language. It's the oldest form of plagiarism, and all reminds me a bit of college "original term paper" sellers. Expect to see this on an internet scale, by and by, now that there's some money in it for the articles' "owners," after they're hosted on Knol.

I think Knol may be good for Wikipedia. If Knol is the number one go-to place for expert, general information, then that should mean that many of the tools who are trying to use Wikipedia for propaganda will leave, making things less stressful for those of us who edit Wikipedia as a hobby. Wikimedia shouldn't mind, because they're not in it to make a profit off of us editors, right?

Perhaps instead of allowing 2500 articles about Adolf Hitler to exist simultaneously, Knol will have some rule that after a certain time period, articles that don't achieve a minimum user rating of at least three out of five stars get deleted.

I think Knol really hurts Citizendium, because Citizendium is supposed to be the place where experts and academics can go to escape the uncontrolled chaos that exists in Wikipedia. Now, they can go to Knol, and perhaps get paid for it.

I think there has a lot that needs to still be hammered out on Knol. WP will still be the only place where pervs and cranks can POV push and still pretend to be authoritative. I think that will be harder to do on Knol.

The authoritative articles will create networks of authoritative links. They will tend towards high quality, whether the author is identified or not. I think there may be a way of making it clearer that good editors are voting high on certain articles, and that will help distribution of knowledge, rather than the engineered misinformation and fanboy dross you see all over WP.

But I'm sure there are still other problems to solve

Doc

From Slashdot:



Is that true? It would be useless, if so.

You can link to anything on Knol...even to Wikipedia; So, it's not a problem: it's an advantage.

It's freedom to do what you see fit: which may include extensive internal links, if that's what you want to do.

Yes indeed, I've just tried and it works fine. You can also copy links from Wikipedia. I've started an article on Medieval Philosophy. Still doesn't show up on a search, though. It is a copy of the article I wrote for Wikipedia. Presumably I can't delete the Wikipedia one? And I'm intrigued how Google will treat the search.

When Knol was first proposed, it was made clear that the Knol editor would get only "a portion" of the AdSense income, with Google keeping the undisclosed remainder portion. It's not easy to tell what their current policy is, but there's no explicit mention of a revenue "split" in the fine print.

Further, they say:

Because an Owner of a knol both controls and is responsible for the AdSense account associated with a given knol, all distributions and payments resulting from a knol’s AdSense monetization will be directed to the knol Owner to whom the related AdSense account is linked, and not to any other members of an Author Team, without regard to any actual or potential joint copyright ownership or private contractual agreement among Author Team members. It shall be the responsibility of the members of an Author Team to agree among themselves regarding any division of monies or payments derived from or associated with their knol’s inclusion in the AdSense program, and you hereby agree that Google shall have no obligation to make AdSense payments to any individual other than the linked AdSense account holder, and that Google shall have no involvement, liability or responsibility in connection with any dispute arising therefrom.

If Google Knol is giving 100% of the ad revenue to the editor, then what we are actually seeing here is very similar to what Centiare.com, Openserving.com, and Wikipedia Review.com (version 2) were seeking to offer editors -- full revenue exploitation of one's content. Google will obviously do things better than what Wikipedia Review will ever be able to do under my management, so Wikipedia Review may only survive as a differentiated product thanks to its Semantic Mediawiki capabilities as a multi-contributor database management tool.

In that sense, I am both saddened and excited by this development.



Could you provide a link, Milton?

That's too funny. You can use a WP User page to advertise your $100,000-a-pop speaking engagement availability. You can use a WP User page to promote your bluegrass band. You can use a WP User page to pay tribute to your favorite Wikia project.

But you can't use a WP User page to encourage your self-interest in Google Knol.

THAT is real hypocrisy.

Hmm - it appears that only American residents can have their names verified, unless any of the multitude of you who are smarter than me have figured out otherwise.

Yes, but you can still post and do everything else. And I'm sure that it's just a temporary thing.

The "name verification" is just something which gives more credence to what you're posting. So, it's not a hindrance to participating.

MR: yeah, I suspect that Wikipedia articles will be the raw material for many lazy Knols (although many will be legitimate repostings from the WP author).

I'll find it perversely satisfying if Wikipedia starts issuing hundreds of take down notices.

Verify by CC wasn't working for me, I keep getting server timeouts. I'll have to wait till I'm home (at a phone that's billed to me) to try the other way.

Also, could the mods sweep up the many many news-bot posts that mention knol, but which have no replies at all, into one thread perhaps? There are so many that it's clogging the recent changes ("View new posts") page worse than I've seen before... thanks.

On what basis would it do so? Wikipedia and its contributors have long accepted that a link to an article's edit history is satisfactory compliance with the GFDL.

Knol articles aren't released under the GFDL, tho, so you can't copy verbatim. They're released under Creative Commons 3.0 which is not (as yet) compatible.

But, as I understand it, the copyright will remain with the contributor. What would be stopping the contributor, provided it was the same person on Wikipedia and Knol, from dual-licensing?

Moreover, if CC 3.0 is more restrictive (if the conditions of CC 3.0 are a subset of the conditions of the GFDL), I don't see why you couldn't just scrape as much content from Wikipedia as you wanted, provided you link back to the article history. While you can't take other people's work from Wikipedia and post it somewhere with a less restrictive license, I don't see why you couldn't do so somewhere with a more restrictive license.

If you are the sole author of the content, you can copy verbatim as you retain your own copyright, even under the GFDL. You just can't copy other people's modifications. So, I think that Peter copying his own WP article is not an infringement of the GFDL. Am I right?

Right, what Peter is doing is totally legitimate.

Now that I think about it, wikipedia probably wouldn't have standing because it doesn't own the copyrights.

However, I would not be too surprised if loyalist contributers issued takedown notices. They would argue that they only allow modified distribution under the license they choose to contribute under, the GFDL.

Of course, if wikipedia is allowed to migrate away from that license anyway, any takedown plan is moot.

Yeah, that's right (assuming no one else has edited it). If you're the author of the content you can do whatever you please with it (and that includes multi-licensing). What I was responding to was the idea that people will just copy articles that they didn't write off Wikipedia out of laziness.

A more interesting question is what will Google's response be if Wikipedia articles are scraped without sufficient attribution? Wikipedia may define sufficient one way, and others may define it another way. A copyright case in court brought by Wikimedia Foundation might not have standing — it might have to be brought by the person who wrote some or all of the Wikipedia article. My guess is that Wikimedia Foundation would most likely pretend that nothing at all is happening.

If Wikimedia Foundation is hands-off, then Google will most likely also be hands-off when it comes to GFDL disputes. Google may have a stronger case under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act by doing nothing at all if the copyright issue is the least bit fuzzy, and there's nothing fuzzier than the Wikipedia situation. The reason Google has it easier is because the author of the Knol article is identified. Google doesn't even have to mess with subpoenas for IP addresses the way that Mike Godwin does.

Scenario: You scrape a Wikipedia article and lock it down with your Knol ownership. You toss a notice on it about how this article, which came from Wikipedia, gets vandalized too frequently, and Wikipedia allows the vandalism to continue, so you saved it for posterity. You allow AdSense on this Knol article.

Who sues who? Some screen name from Wikipedia who claims to have contributed to that article? A screen name? Ha, ha, screen names have no rights. Someone with a real name who contributed a portion of the Wikipedia article? Specify and prove your contribution, and maybe I'll strengthen my attribution, or maybe I'll just delete that portion. Or maybe I'll just ignore you because you'd be crazy to drag the GDFL into court over a few sentences unless you're a very bored billionaire.

Would the real-name Wikipedia writer be able to complain to Google? Sure, they can complain. Google is really good with their robot responses. But my guess is that Google wouldn't even touch this issue. "Scraper" is Google's middle name. That's how they got so rich with AdSense. They might even be thinking that all of Wikipedia could be scraped over to Knol, and plastered with ads, and they'd still be untouchable. Then a tiny piece of code in their algorithm will allow the AdSense scraped pages to pull ahead of their Wikipedia counterparts, slowly but surely. Google is entirely capable of thinking this way.

Maybe, but Google also has some copyright problems on their hands right now.

Since CDA immunity doesn't apply to copyright liability, they would probably automatically comply with takedown notices, at least on first pass. Google really has nothing to gain by being on the other side of a copyright dispute with a Wikipedian, whether they're a bored billionaire, represented by the EFF, or simply a pro se crank. They'd just drop the content from their site--no single knol is worth a lawsuit, even a frivolous one. That's how they roll on YouTube, anyway.

Would take a determined knol contributer to escalate this against some Wikipedia claimant for freaking adsense revenue. Any volunteers?

Done. The fact that you haven't seen worse before is that I'm usually quicker off the mark - sorry I was slower this time.

The process of creating a knol is rather fun, and if you don't get too crazy with formatting and citations, it's certainly a hell of a lot easier than Mediawiki markup. Here's one I completed on Napoleon's seizure of Vienna in 1805. I had to try the New Yorker cartoon feature, you know.

Something that is probably germane to the discussion about scraped Wikipedia content...

Take a look at this knol of mine, which I copied almost word-for-word from my similar page on Wikipedia Review.com. Look down in the lower right sidebar of the knol page:



Google has already loaded in a feature that automatically scrubs the web to see if your work is coming from another source, it would seem. This will make it pretty easy for people to see if content has been made victim to copyright infringement.

I'll keep experimenting as the days go on.

The next area that I'm interested to see in working order is:



If someone who is active on Knol would please review that Napoleon in Vienna article, I would appreciate seeing how that looks.

Greg

P.S. I'll move to add a knol about "Arch Coal", and we'll see if it flags it as similar content to Wikipedia. It shouldn't, since Guy Chapman re-wrote my article ab initio, of course. Done. And it doesn't (yet?) suggest that there's any percentage similarity with any other site. That may take time on Google's side, though.

Or maybe something like original research?

I wonder how hard would it be to take that feature and have Google rate any website for content like that instead of just Knol. Hmmm. Let it process a Wikipedia page and see where Google says the sources came from -- if any. The feature wouldn't even have to be built into MediaWiki.

An experimental knol, to see how long it takes 10 collaborators to finish a Top Ten list. Please add to the list, if you're interested.

There's something on Wikipedia called User:CorenSearchBot that looks for copyvios.

I don't have my name in the phone book or a bank card I can use online, and I'm in my thirties Hopefully they'll allow other ways to verify yourself however, that won't exclude people who choose to be ex-directory, or have a poor credit rating/ limited banking facilities.

You couldn't verify anyway, as you live in the UK (I think?). Currently only US users are able to verify.

Guess who's writing Jimbo's bio on Knol?

I'll give you a hint, she's done original research....



Hahaha.....too funny! Here's the link!

It is true that Section 230 is not directly applicable to copyright law, in the way that DMCA is. However, all Google has to do is program their answer-bot to say that take-down notices and/or general copyright issues should be addressed to the owner of the Knol article. They could toss in the name of the owner in the answer-bot, which would no doubt impress any judge. This would be an excellent first approach for Google.

Knol, by requiring that users have real names, is quite different from Youtube in this respect. It places Google at arms-length from the dispute. Section 230 is relevant by implication because Google can claim that they don't know what's going on with the content on Knol, and it's not their problem what's going on because they verified the identity of the article owner, and offer up the real name of the article owners on every article, and in response to every complaint.

It is difficult for Google to claim this when Viacom is suing you for Youtube content. First, the copyright violations arguably draw most of the traffic to Youtube (that's one of the things that Viacom wants to establish through the discovery process). Second, Google knows or should know, what's going on with Youtube. All you need to violate copyright on Youtube is a screen name, which makes it much more difficult to assign accountability for violations.

I don't think courts would ever say that no one is accountable. So it's either the case that Google is accountable, or the poster is accountable. Google is in a good position with Knol to claim that the poster is responsible, and DMCA doesn't really apply to Google here the way it does with their search engine cache copy, or with Youtube.

But at the base of it, that may not be the fundamental reason Google is requiring "real names" on Knol. Obviously, they're going to need a real indentity for tax purposes if they're ever going to pay anybody with AdSense revenues. That's going to require some W-2-filling out by whoever claims the money, since if it goes over $600 a year (or whatever) the payout will require reporting to the IRS by Knol. So they have to do all this ANYWAY, for accounting reasons, if ANY money changes hands.

Don't make it more complicated than it needs to be. If you write a Knol which makes AdSense money, you are now a subcontractor. How are they going to pay you unless they know precisely who you are?

Well, the "Masterplan" has been unveiled"....

Knol is supposed to "take out" Wikipedia and then redirect people to pages serving Ad-sense ads....

Sounds great to me!

It's just as correct to say that the AdSense ads serve the pages. Particularly since you can choose to link to the ads or choose not to.

Adsense, of course, is no more evil than a TV or radio commercial. It's even more evil to use people's contributions without paying them anything, which is WMF's game-- particularly as they siphon content off to Wikia and make money on it. Or play the starving African child card and make money directly from WMF, or speaking fees generated by the publicity of WMF's projects.

Yeah, Knol should be good if they can get through the paperwork of who to pay and how much. Greg is right that you can't see the fraction that Google keeps, vs. the Knol-wiki owner. But when I spoke about the Wiki owner getting it ALL, I had in mind ALL of what the writers keep. The point is that on Knol, each Wiki-owner is master of the Wiki. Other editors can make suggestions and draft-edits, but the owner gets last say in what is seen by the public, before it is seen. If more than one editor makes suggestions before the draft is promoted, the nice Knol Wiki prompts the owner to look at both suggestions before going away. It's well done.

MR