{"id":773,"date":"2008-07-30T15:34:55","date_gmt":"2008-07-30T14:34:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/773-the-trouble-with-knol.html"},"modified":"2008-07-30T15:34:55","modified_gmt":"2008-07-30T14:34:55","slug":"the-trouble-with-knol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/773-the-trouble-with-knol.html","title":{"rendered":"The trouble with Knol"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is that that it\u2019s going to be full of rubbish. Wikipedia<\/a>, which arguably has less authority because contributions can be anonymous, will likely have more authority, since it is more-or-less restricted by its community to one entry per topic.<\/p>\n

Another way of looking at this is that on Wikipedia, if you want to contribute to a topic that already has an article, you have no choice but to (try and) improve the existing one. On Google Knol<\/a>, there\u2019s every incentive to start a new one, never mind if it duplicates existing content, or is worse than an existing one.<\/p>\n

Take Search Engine Optimization, for example. Wikipedia has an article that looks decent<\/a>. Knol has thirty articles<\/a>; or if you search for SEO, more like seventy<\/a>. And that\u2019s after just a few days.<\/p>\n

Google is good at ranking, and users can rate pages, but Knol is still a mess. You can be sure that many articles will be written primarily to drive traffic to the author\u2019s web site, or to attract Adsense clicks. Wikipedia is not immune to spam; but at least contributors can delete it. All you can do on Knol is to give a spammy article a low rating.<\/p>\n

Thinking aloud, what might work is some kind of Slashdot<\/a>-style filtering. For example, you could have it so that by default Knol searches only show articles which have:<\/p>\n