Google takes on Wikipedia

July 28th, 2008

Google announced today that it made Knol public for a beta launch. Knol is a site where users can write articles on anything and everything and collaborate to make sure the information is the most accurate and up-to-date as possible. Sound familiar?

Knol is made up of “knols” - or pieces of knowledge. Write your own knol and you own it. Other users can request changes, but only the owner can decide what goes live to the world. The idea is that subject matter experts are the ones owning each category, instead of anybody and everybody and nobody on wikipedia. The authors are not anonymous, and many have resume-like bios.

Will it take off? Maybe. Unlike Wikipedia, you can cite the direct author - so maybe it would be a viable “academic source” (read - you could use it in a college research paper). But I think the mass appeal of wikipedia is just that - it’s owned by the masses. Who owns pop culture topics? If I post that Kathy Griffin is still dating Steve Wozniak when CLEARLY the broke up weeks ago, someone will correct me. The great thing about Wikipedia is that what ends up in the article is generally exactly what I want to read about - the trivia, how things are related, the high level most interesting facts about any one topic. A subject matter expert may be too much of an expert to realize what the masses deem important. Also, what if the “owner” of the article becomes complacent and doesn’t keep up with the requests. Wikipedia users have made over 240 million edits in 5 years - that’s approximately 130,000 a day. It’s a lot for a moderator to keep up with.

Sure, I’m skeptical. But I will say this - if anyone can knock Wikipedia off it’s throne, it’s Google.

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Wiki groaning - and you can too.

January 25th, 2008

Wikiality really is an interesting cultural phenomena. Wiki Groaning is the game that lets us determine what modern day internet users find more fascinating. Put two topics up against each other - a “fight” if you will. Whichever page is longer is clearly more important to modern day society.
This all started on a Friday afternoon at the office in which I was attempting to find the most famous person whose wikipedia page is shorter than the page for Koolaid.

As quickly as it began, it got ridiculous. The best way to play is put the pages in different tabs, and flip between to see which scroll bar is shorter. That is the winner.

Most notable matches of the day: