{"id":2029,"date":"2007-12-14T00:15:58","date_gmt":"2007-12-14T05:15:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/12\/14\/is-google-going-after-wikipedia\/"},"modified":"2007-12-14T00:15:58","modified_gmt":"2007-12-14T05:15:58","slug":"is-google-going-after-wikipedia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/12\/14\/is-google-going-after-wikipedia\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Google going after Wikipedia?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via a Twitter post from MG Siegler at ParisLemon, I just came across a post on the Google Blog<\/a> about a project the search giant is calling Knol, which stands for “a unit of knowledge,” apparently (who comes up with these goofy names?). I have to agree with the Lemon<\/a> that this is potentially huge. What Google is describing sounds a lot like an expert version of Wikipedia, or essentially what estranged Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has been trying to create in Citizendium<\/a>: in other words, a more reliable Wikipedia, created and moderated by experts.<\/p>\n

There’s a screenshot<\/a> of what a Knol would look like on a topic such as insomnia, and it includes all the information that someone coming to a topic would want to know, according to Google — in other words, pretty much the same stuff<\/a> that Wikipedia (or Squidoo or Mahalo) would have in an article about the same topic. The only difference that I can see is that Wikipedia entries seem to have more links.<\/p>\n

One of the biggest differences, as MG Siegler notes<\/a>, is that the authors of the articles are featured, with photos and a profile page. In addition to the ability to comment on the article — and apparently adding information Wikipedia-style, according to the Google blog post<\/a> — readers can see other articles written by the same writer, and the articles have a star rating that refers to “peer” reviews, which are also visible in the sidebar.<\/p>\n

I think this could be huge. A more authoritative version of Wikipedia, compiled by experts and powered by Google? Not only that, but as Paul Kedrosky points out<\/a>, the pages come with Google ads, and authors get a revenue share — he says (and I agree) that it could hurt not just Wikipedia but Mahalo and plenty of others, especially if those pages start to rank highly in Google searches. Like I said — huge.<\/p>\n

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Via a Twitter post from MG Siegler at ParisLemon, I just came across a post on the Google Blog about a project the search giant is calling Knol, which stands for “a unit of knowledge,” apparently (who comes up with these goofy names?). I have to agree with the Lemon that this is potentially huge. … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Is Google going after Wikipedia?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2029\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}