After the preview on Knol released long ago, Google finally placed it on public beta a few days back. Everyone knows it’s a wikipedia kinda idea, just coupled with attempts to make the knowledge and information provided by articles more professional and accurate. They call it ‘moderated collaboration’. To make Knol pages “meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read” is not much different from Wikipedia articles, which people normally use as the starting point of a research, getting an overview as well as a list of references that points them to other websites.
If Wikipedia is considered a free market, Knol tries to introduce more hierarchy to improve the quality of the knowledge held there. This perhaps means lower efficiency in some sense because of information being put on the shelf to await moderation (I am saying this without knowing exactly how the ‘moderated collaboration’ works). Ultimately I wonder what sort of knowledge constitutes the ‘knowledge’ to be placed there. Somehow people resist thinking of those pop trivia as ‘knowledge’ – at least not on equal footing as an article on ‘superconductivity’ or ‘quantum tunneling’. If Knols is really about ‘anything’, I think Wikipedia makes much more sense. The idea of ‘moderation’ is difficult to apply on things that might possibly be posted on the more trivial articles like the Biographical data of a celebrity, or the stats of a Pokemon.
If ‘moderation’ is a key thing on Knols to differentiate itself, there’s a need to segment and possibly classify knowledge as well as give different treatment to different sort of articles. There’s thus people who raised the idea that given Knol’s emphasis on contributors and knowledge, the project will evolve into something closer to About.com rather than Wikipedia. The ‘experts’ on Knol have the tendency of writing more in-depth specific articles on a particular phenomenon, disease or issue rather than give an overview. The results would be Knol project usually having a couple of articles on the same topic but different aspects of it. For example, one would give the full overview of a disease, including the different type of it, the symptoms and reasons behind each of those symptoms. Then there’s another one on treatments available and things to look out for and activities that might possibly trigger the symptoms. One additional article might possibly be a trivia sort, listing what movie/drama characters is said to suffer from the disease in their stories. The reason for this is that Knol’s emphasis on contributors allow people to ‘own’ the article and to restrict others from contributing edits. This slows down synthesis of information and end up with unnecessary overlaps/duplicates of knowledge.
I would expect Knol to be changing their aim, to focus only on certain knowledge, or changing their contributing policies, to allow ‘anything’ so it may be a useful project in any sense.
After such a long time, I finally finished Making Globalization Work by Joseph Stiglitz. I have got to thank Ruiyuan, Pei Shan and Yong Xian for getting it as my Birthday present this year. I had wanted the book since it was published some time in 2006 (September 2006 to be exact) but I kind of procrastinated the purchase. First I couldn’t justify the price – Stiglitz’ Globalization and Its Discontents was quite a dense book for me at the 2005/2006 period and so I thought Making would be quite similar. Second, I didn’t think I have time to read; it was preparation for A Levels! Finally, I was hoping someone would get it for me some day.
Of course, I got my wish, but only after I bought it at a heavily discounted price due to a Times discount voucher I got for my birthday. Later when I realised Yong Xian and gang also got me the book, I was frustrated for a little while. Fortunately I managed to exchange it for another book (with topping up the price difference). That book is a uber dense one: The Real Price of Everything; it’s essence of a couple of well-known economics classics. I’ll talk about it when I have the chance to read it.
As many have mentioned, Stiglitz is really a brave guy. He criticized the western governments and international organizations more fiercely in Making than Discontents. Originally he argued in Discontents that special interests too often plagued the governments and those international organizations, making it difficult for them to help the developing countries despite good intentions. In Making, he seem to have grown impatient of the international organizations and decided that they should not even be making the mistake of allowing special interests to dominate them. He introduced the idea of Economic Globalization outpacing Political Globalization, suggesting that our trade regimes are somewhat haphazard and we have not synchronized the general direction of development in spite of convergence in certain markets.
More significantly, Stiglitz shown himself to be more than a passive critic, he proposes ideas to make globalization work (some new and most suggested by many economists) and analyse how these ideas might impact on the current state of affairs. I haven’t exactly been keeping up with news but it appears that most of his ideas are still not exactly adopted. Amongst them includes one of the very bold proposal on a reform for the Global Reserves System – that would probably require a very long time involving very gradual steps. Unfortunately, Stiglitz doesn’t give any sort of timeline or define procedures involved in the transition.
Despite decades of development and study, Macroeconomics still remain a somewhat new subject and no doubt an extremely dynamic one. There’s too many untested ideas and theories. Unlike Microeconomics where we conduct experiment both in small scale groups and computer simulation, the same tools for study do not exist for Marcoeconomics. We can only progress by real world trial and error that does not offer very precise results because we can’t quite tune our variables precisely either. That certainly won’t be the last Macroeconomics text I’m going to read in my life but I am pretty confident I’m not going to be pondering over the questions – Stiglitz is trying to tackle – in my career.
