Is Google going after Wikipedia?
Via a Twitter post from MG Siegler at ParisLemon, I just came across a post on the Google Blog about a project the search giant is calling Knol, which stands for “a unit of knowledge,” apparently (who comes up with these goofy names?). I have to agree with the Lemon that this is potentially huge. What Google is describing sounds a lot like an expert version of Wikipedia, or essentially what estranged Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has been trying to create in Citizendium: in other words, a more reliable Wikipedia, created and moderated by experts.
There’s a screenshot of what a Knol would look like on a topic such as insomnia, and it includes all the information that someone coming to a topic would want to know, according to Google — in other words, pretty much the same stuff that Wikipedia (or Squidoo or Mahalo) would have in an article about the same topic. The only difference that I can see is that Wikipedia entries seem to have more links.
One of the biggest differences, as MG Siegler notes, is that the authors of the articles are featured, with photos and a profile page. In addition to the ability to comment on the article — and apparently adding information Wikipedia-style, according to the Google blog post — readers can see other articles written by the same writer, and the articles have a star rating that refers to “peer” reviews, which are also visible in the sidebar.
I think this could be huge. A more authoritative version of Wikipedia, compiled by experts and powered by Google? Not only that, but as Paul Kedrosky points out, the pages come with Google ads, and authors get a revenue share — he says (and I agree) that it could hurt not just Wikipedia but Mahalo and plenty of others, especially if those pages start to rank highly in Google searches. Like I said — huge.
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One note: while Google is working with "experts" at first, it seems like anyone will be able to make a page once they open it up. However with their various rating systems in place, no doubt the "expert" pages will float to the top.
And yes, the monetization factor is huge. Imagine how much money Wikipedia would make with just one ad - you can bet Google, which refers millions of visitors to that site, knows full well - and if they recreate a Wikipedia, with the twist of authority and monetization - that they can feature in their own results, they're looking at another huge pool sea of money.
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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. I wonder precisely what rights over other people's work they're going to try to claim.
If the quality of the work is good, we'd probably use it for references, like we do about.com.
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someone who works with Wikipedia. And I agree that this seems a
little bit like About.com 2.0, but with Google in the driver's seat.
If nothing else, it's going to be interesting to watch.
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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.
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other engines showed you what they wanted to show you; google showed you what you wanted to find.
as google becomes a content producer, they will, surely, game their search results in their own favour. there's no indication of how they will deal with this yet.
anyway, that's bad for the web, but, i suppose, inevitable.
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