To Knol or not to Knol, that is the question

24 July 2008 · Comments

Google have now released their Wikipedia competitor, Knol, where a “knol” is defined as:

…an authoritative article about a specific topic.

knol.google.com

Taking a look through a few of the articles (e.g. infertility, diarrhea (sic), athlete’s foot to get a feel for the place, some of them read more like layperson¹-friendly entries into journals.

The content does appear to be of a good quality, and topics don’t seem as narrowly defined as they do in Wikipedia. I do think, perhaps, it would behove article maintainers to not only make the article friendly in terms of language to non-specialists, but also make it presentable: the layout of some of the articles is, frankly, attrocious.

At the moment, most of the articles appear to deal with medical topics, although I’m sure that when those who are passionate about their areas of expertise are aware of Knol (especially if they have a bit of an ego) it’ll quickly fill up with some good quality content.

From the articles I’ve taken a look at I get a sense that there’s a lot more personality behind this than Wikipedia has; someone human, someone that actually cares, has written this. Wikipedia—at least the English version that I’m most familiar with—always gave me the impression, with it’s strict NPOV philosophy (which I do appreciate on one level), that it was written for and by emotionless alien robots who want nothing but facts, facts, facts. Knol seems far more personal, almost as if there’s advice being given, not just information.

One of the issues that I can see immediately is that referring to Knol articles is a pain. Look at this URL:

http://knol.google.com/k/nikki-levin/athletes-foot-tinea-pedis/saclI5Bh/f9HbJg#

That’s what people see in their address bar in their browser, and are going to want to send to people and say “hey! check this out!”. But the URLs are, frankly, shite. What’s that crap in the last two fragments at the end? And why the need for the persistent /k at the front? Yeah, I know that Wikipedia does this with /wiki, but it doesn’t make any damned difference if everything has it, does it? The sooner they sort this out, the better.

I’ve yet to take an in-depth look at Knol, but I’m going to spend a little time doing so today, and keep my eye on it in the future. It does though have a long way to go before even dreaming of catching up with Wikipedia. But it looks interesting, and any easy way of getting the mainstream public interested in knowing rather than ignoring (or simply making shit up) is good in my book.

Personally, I can’t wait to see who they come up with² as ‘experts’ (and their “authoritative” articles) when it comes to those topics that we know and love.