[RodgerB]

On the 13/12/07, Google announced the birth of it's latest innovation, the Knols Project. It is a Wiki project with quite the same goals as Wikipedia. I know I'd rather contribute to the Knols Project than Wikipedia, as I know Google would almost certainly keep data safe and secure without any hassles, and they claim they won't be doing any editing or blocking of certain locations such as Utah etc.

http://googleblog.bl...contribute.html

And, here is an example image of an article:
http://www.google.co...ogs/knol_lg.png

I am excited!

[UnForgotenLaW]

i hate wikipedia :P

[Tom9729]

Wikipedia blocks Utah?

[jjhaag]

Parts of it, at least...

http://www.theregist..._and_overstock/

[max302]

Great! That way Wikipedia will go out of business or sell themselves to Google and stop holding fund raising all the time. It'll be administered much better by google anyways.

[Martyr2]

You know, it is easy to say they won't block people or prevent people from editing. However, when you get to be the size of wikipedia, Google will have to step in and take charge of content editing and administering of malicious users. This isn't saying if Google can or can not handle it better than Wikipedia foundation, but it will be interesting to see what happens with this.

Google will eventually put the smack down if the project really takes off if they wish to keep the content relevant and under control. Otherwise people will abuse it badly.

[Tom9729]

I'm just curious why you guys think that Google's version is going to be so much better? Google is great, and I love a lot of their software, but what Wikipedia has going for it is shear quantity of articles.

Quote

I know I'd rather contribute to the Knols Project than Wikipedia, as I know Google would almost certainly keep data safe and secure without any hassles, and they claim they won't be doing any editing or blocking of certain locations such as Utah etc.

Wikis aren't for storing credit card information, or family photos (unless you're famous). They're places to store general knowledge. If you write a great article, and put it on Wikipedia, only to have someone vandalize it, restoring your article is a few clicks away (revisions, everything is saved).

From what I read, the incident with Utah involved the owner of Overstock.com editing the Overstock wikipedia page with fake information to make the company look better. After attempts to block the owner from doing this, Wikipedia resorted to blocking IP ranges (the owner was using proxies to get through).

I see two things happening in the future with Google Knols. Either it will suffer the same problems as Wikipedia, or it will be locked down and much harder to edit (and thus, will suffer from a lack of content).

But hey, competition is good.

[RodgerB]

Tom9729, on 5 Jan, 2008 - 06:55 AM, said:

Quote

I know I'd rather contribute to the Knols Project than Wikipedia, as I know Google would almost certainly keep data safe and secure without any hassles, and they claim they won't be doing any editing or blocking of certain locations such as Utah etc.

Wikis aren't for storing credit card information, or family photos (unless you're famous). They're places to store general knowledge. If you write a great article, and put it on Wikipedia, only to have someone vandalize it, restoring your article is a few clicks away (revisions, everything is saved).

Hypothetical Scenario:
A war occurs. Everything is blown up, but you find the whole Wikipedia project protected and unharmed. You have blasted off in a spacecraft and there is only a 2 males, 2 females, a tree, a bee hive and a temporary supply of water. You are destined for mars, and plan on rebuilding a civilization there.

Using rocks, you build a home and make the place relatively air-tight with moon dust and saliva to stick it together. The bee's pollinate the trees, the warmth from your ass germinates the seeds, and more tree's grow. As for food, i guess there really isn't much option. You must keep one female producing fetuses for food, one female to make more people and the other male to research ways to concatenate elements to together to create arrays of elements, also known as air, water, etc.

Just think how great it would be to present wikipedia to someone in the Dark Ages. Just think how advanced we would be today.