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.
