Remember Google knol, the user-generated online encyclopedia that was supposed to take on Wikipedia?
The plan, announced in late 2007 and rolled out last summer, involved getting subject experts to publish and discuss "knols," or articles on various topics. The easier interface, the requirement for authors to create accounts, and features like expert debates were intended to establish knol as a trusted source of information while discouraging a culture of anonymity, which has led to vandalism and other inaccuracies on Wikipedia.
That was the plan. But in practice, knol has generated only a fraction of the interest and participation that Wikipedia's English-language site commands.
Consider these statistics:
* Last month, Google announced that the 100,000th knol had been published. The English version of Wikipedia alone has nearly 3 million articles.
* Only a dozen knols have more than 100 comments.
* The knol with the most page views is The Self, with nearly 255,000 views. Individual Wikipedia articles don't show traffic data, but the site claims that articles about influenza were getting over 200,000 requests per hour on April 29th (The knol about influenza, written by a doctor, has under 4,000 views total, and just 51 page views so far this week).
Knol may be struggling to gain traffic and mindshare, but Cedric Dupont, a product manager for knol at Google, is confident that knol is headed in the right direction -- that is, providing an easy way for users to create and publish content.
"The objective of knol is to encourage people to share their knowledge online, in particular people who do not already do so today," he told The Standard. "Knol has made great strides towards achieving that goal."
He said that Google is continuously refining knol and adding new features. He pointed to Knol Collections, which lets users group and cross-link knols. This enables users to create a larger body of work. If, for instance, a user is self-publishing a book on knol, each chapter of the book could be represented through individual knols, which can then be linked into a collection.
Comments
OK, Knol isn't as big as Wikipedia *yet*.
But I'm quite confident it will become more and more important, because people can improve upon each others and the competition of the best article about any subject can take place on Knol, which is not the case for Wikipedia.
If you think you have a winning format, you can try it out on Knol, Wikipedia doesn't except articles without its stringent format rules.
Wikipedia has one main feature that Knol hasn't : articles about the same subject in different languages are interlinked ... I don't see this happen on Knol.
Besides I think this feature explains why Wikipedia articles are ranking so high in any given search engine... and not merely because of their quality...
Personally, I've had it with the editors on Wikipedia preventing any change... if it's not implement top-down, I like to work bottom-up, but that's nowadays impossible on Wikipedia.
I've had it to with the correction of pages of politicians, apparently most of them are now closely watched ( I've tried editing Pieter De Crem 's profile on Wikipedia some while back ).
And I like my picture and name next to an article I've written. Vanity, o vanity, all things are vain...
My prediction is that knol will have one million articles by the end of the first year. That will make knol a stable platform.
I wrote a knol with the title Goal of Knol to present my estimate for the second year performance of knol.
I am also developing a directory of intersting knols and a directory of new knols to provide easy browsing of some selected knols.
http://a-knol.blogspot.com/
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