Google wants to take on Wikipedia? Please.
December 19, 2007
Google Knol…do you say it like "hole" or "doll"? I don’t know. But it’s an interesting intended competitor for Wikipedia, and with the Google name behind it I think they’re assuming success. I wouldn’t be so sure though. Wikipedia has brand recognition now too, guys.
December 19th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
I pronounce ‘hole’ and ‘doll’ the same.
The knol experiment looks interesting but I think it’ll have the same problems I expect Scholarpedia and the like to have: writing a whole article represents a significant investment of time. With Wikipedia you can ease in, fix a typo here, rewrite a paragraph there, create a stub and rely on the fact that other people will add stuff. But when I’ve created articles on Wikipedia – even short ones based on only a few easily found sources – it’s taken me a whole afternoon. When I’ve done serious research to revamp a page in danger of deletion, it’s taken days. And most people don’t want to jump into a new thing with a days-long project; they want to test the waters first. Get addicted to it slowly.
So I just think Google Knol is going to have trouble getting enough people to participate enough that there’ll be enough content for the whole thing not to flop due to lack of interest.
(I haven’t heard much about Scholarpedia lately. But glancing at its stats, it seems to have not-yet 1,000 articles in progress, after not-yet two years. Wikipedia was well past 10,000 articles in progress by the end of its first year. 926 isn’t shoddy, but still.)