“The emerging consensus of the community seems to be for a global blackout of English Wikipedia,” Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, said on Twitter on Monday afternoon.  “Final details [are] under consideration but consensus seems to be for ‘full’ rather than ‘soft’ blackout… This is going to be wow.”

Wikipedians have been considering the radical measure for several weeks, alongside other sites such as Reddit. This weekend’s statement from the White House, which appeared to side with Silicon Valley – prompting criticism from media owners including News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch – has failed to dissuade them of the need for a blackout, making it a controversial decision among some users and editors.

I’m not sure if the people with the most power to nix SOPA–lawmakers–care that much about Wikipedia. But how would they react if even a small percentage of us who do care about Wikipedia were moved by the blackout to call our congresspeople and voice opposition to SOPA?

And it’s closing Knol. Depending on how you looked at it, Knol was either a lot like Wikipedia (it was meant to be an immense user-generated repository of the world’s knowledge) or not much at all like Wikipedia (opinion was welcome, and contributors had a shot at making money from their articles). I started out skeptical about the service, then got intrigued before deciding it was off to a lousy start.

Knol didn’t get much better with time. Whenever I checked in, the items on the home page were mostly a bit odd, a bit spammy, or both. Google has an exit strategy for Knol content: It can be exported to a WordPress-based platform called Annotum. But Knol’s termination is really just a formality–it never lived up to any of the big plans Google once had for it.

Still, Knol started out promising. It certainly sounded interesting in the launch story by Wired’s Steven Levy. He wrote about the service’s inventor, Google exec/search pioneer Udi Manber, and began with an anecdote that resonated with me. Manber, Levy wrote, was moved to create Knol because he was felt that the Web was still full of “black holes”–important topics that were insufficiently documented. Such as the life and work of the wonderful New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno. (Manber, it turns out, is, like me, a cartoon fan.)

Levy ended his article by returning to the topic of Peter Arno:

If Google’s plan works, future searchers will get higher-quality results from searches of subjects commonplace and obscure — even Peter Arno. In fact, a knol has already been written about The New Yorker cartoonist. If its author posts it — he hasn’t pulled the trigger yet — Google won’t have to work hard to verify the expert who worked for weeks to pen that item. It’s Udi Manber.

Each time I dropped in on Knol, I searched for Peter Arno. Each time, nothing came up. And searching Google for “peter arno” still returns shockingly little information on one of the greatest magazine cartoonists who ever lived. Even the Wikipedia article on the man is woefully inadequate.

In other words, Knol was a good idea–it’s just that the smart, knowledgeable people who Udi Manber thought would fill it with content failed to do so. Including, apparently, Udi Manber.

I wonder if he’d consider beefing up Wikipedia’s Arno entry?

Wikipedia’s looking for donations again, which means co-founder Jimmy Wales’ “personal appeal”–and face–is back at the top of every Wikipedia page. The Jimmy Wales Mugshot Method (that’s what I’m calling it, at least) was apparently quite successful last year, helping the user-generated free encyclopedia set a fundraising record, so the revival is no surprise.

Still, you might be sick of seeing Jimmy Wales’ face by now, especially because the alignment of the image on the page can lead to some unfortunate misunderstandings. Fortunately, Taylor Buley has developed a simple way to hide Wales’ mug forever, in three easy steps:

• Go to Buley’s Github page.
• Drag the “De-jimmy” link into your browser’s bookmarks bar or Favorites bar.
• Click on the bookmark while browsing any Wikipedia page where Wales’ face appears.

Although you only click the bookmark on a single page, it applies throughout the site. After that, the only way to get Jimmy back is to clear your browser’s cookies and restart the browser.

Also, tuning out the pleas of a site that provides gobs of knowledge for free seems a little evil, but if you’ve gone this far, I’m going to assume you already got the message, and maybe even donated.

[This post republished from Techland.]

Anyhow, I feel a T-Poll coming on…

An EeePC that’s a tablet.

Nokia preps giant app store.

How to research: copy Wikipedia!

Blu-Ray sales up 72 percent.

I’ve pointed cameras at TVs.

Big Sony e-reader in works?

Stardates for your Google Calendar.

SugarSync adds a free version.

Hulu tiptoes towards international expansion.

Hey, my HDTV’s a Vizio.

Microsoft announced today that Encarta software products will be discontinued by June, and that MSN Encarta Web sites worldwide would be shuttered on Halloween–with the exception of Encarta Japan, which will close at the end of the year.

A FAQ on Microsoft’s Web site reads: “(T)he category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past.”

While its decision to discontinue out will no doubt help Microsoft tighten its belt, it is a sad occurrence. After all, there is a reason why college professors accept research cited from Encarta and not Wikipedia: one is trustworthy, and the other is not entirely valid.

As comedian Stephen Colbert hilariously pointed out, it’s possible for anyone to vandalize Wikipedia. Colbert caused chaos on Wikipedia by urging his viewers to edit the Wikipedia entry on elephants, and modified entries about himself and George Washington on air.

I lament the loss of Encarta, and encourage Microsoft to release its contents into the public domain or via a Creative Commons license so it doesn’t disappear, period. (Unless licensing agreements prevent it–Encarta incorporates content from several defunct dead-tree encyclopedia.) There need to be validated sources of the truth in a world beleaguered by spin and distraction.

Apparently someone went into the Wikipedia entry for President Obama at about 11:44pm ET last night, deleting the entire entry to read the epithet three times over. The wording was in such a position that Google’s crawlers picked it up.

The edit was quickly reversed in two minutes. However it apparently was not fast enough for it not to be crawled by Google’s servers. Below is the screenshot. As this is a family site, the front page version has been edited. A uncensored version is posted after the fold.

If anything, this goes to strengthen the argument which seems to be brewing lately over whether Wikipedia should become more stringent over who it lets edit its postings.

Incidents like this are a perfect example of why it should happen. If Wikipedia wants to be a reliable resource, it may be time for the site to start vetting its writers. It’s good that people want to help, but there’s people out there who have nothing better to commit than stupid antics like this.

I have a request for comment out to Google and Wikipedia on the situation, but I’m not expecting much other than a canned response.

On the other hand, as I said back in July, I think Knol is a neat idea. When it launched, it sported an oddball collection of entries that skewed heavily towards covering diseases. I was curious to see how much progress it had made in the interim. So I checked in today…and was startled by what I found. Depressed, actually.

I started by searching for ten topics (selected off the top of my head) that have extensive entries on Wikipedia to see if Knol had anything to say about them:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Impressionism
Magnetism
Marie Curie
Nuclear Power
Sarah Palin
Steve Wozniak
TiVo
Walt Disney
World War I

Knol returned an entry for only one of these, Impressionism–and it was a perfunctory 500-word article with no examples of the art movement. (Wikipedia has four thousand words and more than two dozen illustrations.)

I couldn’t believe that Knol went one-for-ten on my little test. And so I tried again, thinking that I’d done something wrong or encountered some weird glitch. It was then that I noticed a message that appeared at the end of Knol searches:

The message didn’t explain exactly what matches Knol was withholding, or why. But I tried clicking on it–and discovered that Knol did have entries for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sarah Palin, and Steve Wozniak. It just doesn’t show them by default when you search for those subjects. Why? I can’t imagine. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Google do search and do it amazingly badly.

The Buffy entry at Wikipedia is a classic example of Wikipedia being simultaneously incredibly useful and a little scary: It goes on and on and on, and has 119 footnotes. Knol has 123 words on the series, which don’t even mention that it was based on a movie: I know virtually nothing about Buffy, and even I knew that.

The entries on Palin and Woz, however, were much more detailed. Suspiciously detailed, in fact–and they carried the obsessive-but-generic earmarks of the Wikipedia prose style. Could they have been lifted from Wikipedia, at least in part?

Yes indeed. Here are the first two paragraphs of Knol’s entry on Woz:

…and here’s Wikipedia on Woz:

The Knol version of the Woz article was nearly identical to Wikipedia’s entry, but not entirely so: I noticed that it didn’t mention his August marriage, indicating that it drew from an out-of-date version of the Wikipedia piece.

Here’s a snippet of Knol’s article on Sarah Palin:

And the corresponding section in Wikipedia’s entry:

Not identical, but more alike than different.

But the most striking thing about Knol’s entry on Sarah Palin is this: It rightly identifies her as the current governor of the state of Alaska. But except for the cryptic note “Sarah Palin VP of John McCain” at the very top of the entry, it doesn’t mention that she’s also the presumptive Republican nominee for the vice presidency of the United States of America.

Actually, it’s worse than that–it says there had been rumors she might be McCain’s running mate, but that she wasn’t really a contender because of an ethics probe against her:

A tad inaccurate and out of date, no? Especially considering that the entry was added to Knol on August 29th, the day Palin became McCain’s running mate.

Much of the power of Wikipedia, of course, comes from its collaborative nature. And within moments of news breaking such as McCain picking Palin, you can be sure that someone will add it to the appropriate Wikipedia entries. When someone makes a mistake in a Wikipedia piece–and it happens all the time–there’s a good chance someone else will come along and fix it.

Knol is fundamentally different: It’s designed to hold entries written by individuals. “[No] one else can edit your knol (unless you permit it) or mandate how you write about a topic,” states the Knol entry about Knol. Which means that information that’s inaccurate or stale may stay so forever–you gotta think that if the person who added the Knol on Sarah Palin hasn’t gone back to update it by now, there’s a strong chance that he’s lost interest.

Which brings up the “authors” of the two entries which crib from Wikipedia: The Palin one is credited to Sam Goldfarb and the Woz one to Jean Jacques Frapsauce (actually “jean jacques frapsauce”.) It’s possible that these gents contributed to the Wikipedia articles that they appear to have cut-and-pasted into Knol, but they certainly weren’t solely responsible for them. They’re taking credit for the work of others, and because their Knol versions of the entries aren’t editable, they’re not just copies of Wikipedia’s entries–they’re fundamentally flawed copies.

Goldfarb and Frapsauce, in other words, would seem not to be the “experts who know their stuff” who Google wants to use Knol, as explained in Steve Levy’s story on the site. Knol has a mechanism for verifying the identities of those who publish articles in it, but it can’t really identify them as experts. It can’t even stop them from pasting in content from Wikipedia or elsewhere. (Knol has a “Flag inappropriate content” link, but there’s no indication that it occurred to Google that plagiarism might be a problem: You can say that an article contains sexually explicity content or hate speech or spam, but not that it isn’t original.)

Knol also lets users rate the articles, which is presumably one of the “multiple cues that help you evaluate the quality and veracity of information” mentioned in the Knol documentation. But the Palin entry has five stars, and while the Woz one has no stars, it’s not clear whether that means it’s lousy, or just that nobody has voted yet. In fact, Knol doesn’t indicate how many people voted at all, which is a major omission: There’s a big difference between one person giving the Palin entry five stars and fifty people doing so.

Okay, so much for the ten subjects I tried to research on Knol. My luck was so poor that I went back to the Knol homepage in search of better entries. That homepage has five “Featured Knols” up top, the most prominent of which is about diabetic dog food. They’re pretty good. Then there are a few dozen more Knols in a section with the cryptic title “Plain ol’ bag o’ knols.” Is that section made up of popular Knols? Ones selected by Google as good examples? Utterly random ones? I dunno.

I browsed through the Plain ol’ bag o’ knols and noted the following:

–The first Knol in the “bag” is by the Woz entry’s Jean Jacques Frapsauce; it’s on the Beijing Olympics, speaks of them in the future tense, and cribs from Wikipedia;

–A link to a Knol on The Simpsons leads to a page that says “The requested knol is currently not published,” as did a link for something called “Planning Beyond the Numbers”;

–Knols on “Allah, Does It Mean God?” and “A Reasonable Faith” are religious tracts; I have nothing against ‘em, but they wouldn’t seem to be the “units of knowledge” that Google says are Knol’s purpose;

–”How to Be Successful” is actually meandering thoughts by a recent high school graduate on his career plans;

–”Liposuction and Metabolism: Does the body change after Liposuction?” is mostly what seems to be the outline for a long article in teeny-tiny type, with some promotional copy for a plastic surgery center in Texas at the end;

–Some of the Knols, such as “Step by Step Guide to Employee Satisfaction Surveys” are, at least, not bad. Not fantastic, but not bad.

I really hope that the bag o’ knols is not a spotlight on the best the site has to offer–but such a spotlight would be really helpful.

Oh, and one other note: I searched for a Knol I was actively looking forward to reading: The one that Steve Levy’s article says that Knol founder Udi Manber has written on New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno. It’s not there yet. Wikipedia’s Arno entry remains inadquate, but at least it exists.

When I first wrote about Knol back in December of last year, I said the following:

“…Google is better at getting things started than finishing them. Services like Google Base and Google Page Creator remain rough drafts at best, eons after they debuted. Even a company with resources as vast as Google can’t do everything and do everything well.”

Knol’s content will surely grow exponentially in the months to come, but quantity is only one issue. Quality needs to get better, too–a Knol that’s filled with swill would be pretty dismaying, and the site in its current form shows that the emphasis on individual authors creates problems that Wikipedia doesn’t have. Basic functionality needs to get better, too: The Knol search engine in its current form seems to be broken, and I think it needs better features for separating wheat from chaff. And I’d give the Knol homepage a major overhaul that helps people find the best Knols rather than featuring some really bad ones.

I still think Knol is a cool idea. If real experts show up and fill it up with the authoritative articles it’s designed to hold, it could be a wonderful resource. But for now, I’m not making any predictions about when or if that’ll happen…

]]> http://technologizer.com/2008/09/01/googles-knol-so-far-not-so-good/feed/ 21 Harry McCracken