Google today announced the public launch of their competitive online encyclopedia, "Knol". Good choice after a word that rhymes with "troll".
Upon visiting their site, on the front page 4 images are dedicated for people writing, and 1 for actual content. There's a lot of medical stuff, diseases, conditions and the sorts but, not many other fields covered.
Ironically, the creators behind this idea, still haven't got the point of a policy of NPOV after telling Wired "One article is written by one person, and it's one person's opinion,". Okay.
Really, Knol is a far more "professional" attempt at being something that should neither be "professional" nor "amateur" in nature, but rather "accurate" as possible. In short the people and their opinions are as important, than fact itself. Nice one.
** 1/2.
Knol misidentifies the problems with Wikipedia, and therefore fails to fix any of them.
sighs....
We can't really talk intelligently about how good of a website Knol is without giving it some time to develop. I suggest waiting a few months and seeing where it goes.
I doubt people thought Wikipedia was going to be at all successful when it first started out.
Knol's got nothing on Conservapedia.
Conservapedia's got nothing on Metapedia.
"One article is written by one person, and it's one person's opinion,"
So it's like Wikipedia's failed predecessor Nupedia?
Actually, Knol is more a digital repository than an online encyclopaedia like Wikipedia is.
Or maybe a mixture of both.
Every author can adjust the terms of use for his article and also earn money by posting it on Knol. It's way easier and more comfortable than the most digital repositories already existing (mostly managed by universities).
I think it will be a great success. Storing their articles there is more attractive than letting them rot in some digital archive only a few students will ever use.
Encyclopedia Dramatica or Conservapedia.
Which is funnier?