By Joel Leyden
Israel News Agency

Tel Aviv ----- July 28, 2008 ....... It softly slipped into the news in the most subtle manner. An item which will surely create an information firestorm on the Internet. During the hot, lazy days of summer, with very little fanfare, Google announced that Knol was going public.

Google describes Knol as "a unit of knowledge." The Israel News Agency would describe Knol as the soon to be ultimate, free and responsible on-line encyclopedia. An encyclopedia which will wash Wikipedia away in a matter of months.

Wikipedia, which started out as a social experiment created by Larry Sanger (now managing director of Citizendium) and Jimmy Wales today boasts having over 10 million articles in 253 languages, comprising a combined total of over 1.74 billion words. It was launched in January 2001 by a soft porn site - Bomis, which provided both money and bandwidth to Wikipedia.

Jimmy Wales once described Wikipedia as the "the sum of all human knowledge." When in fact, Wikipedia has actually turned out to become the sum of all human gossip and rumor. An encyclopedia that has been disowned by almost every university and every respectable news organization as a reliable source of information.

Wikipedia set out with a noble goal. That was to provide every human being with the opportunity to share their knowledge. The only problem with that is that some humans communicate better than others. And those who are paid to communicate are called editors. And those editors usually know what they are talking about and their work is transparent. They don't hide behind an alias as if they were CIA, NSA, Mossad or MI5. Anyone can edit Wikipedia. And do so without identifying who they are and what their agenda is. As such, Wikipedia has hurt the names of hundreds if not thousands of good people and organizations through both slander and libel.

One such case was that of former USA TODAY editorial page editor John Seigenthaler. Wikipedia for four months carried an article falsely linking him to the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and John F. Kennedy.

"I have no idea whose sick mind conceived the false, malicious "biography" that appeared under my name for 132 days on Wikipedia," said Seigenthaler.

"I phoned Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder and asked, Do you have any way to know who wrote that? No, we don't, he said. Representatives of the other two Websites said their computers are programmed to copy data verbatim from Wikipedia, never checking whether it is false or factual. Naturally, I want to unmask my "biographer." And, I am interested in letting many people know that Wikipedia is a flawed and irresponsible research tool. When I was a child, my mother lectured me on the evils of gossip. She held a feather pillow and said, If I tear this open, the feathers will fly to the four winds, and I could never get them back in the pillow. That's how it is when you spread mean things about people. For me, that pillow is a metaphor for Wikipedia."

For many to be listed on Wikipedia, is not an honor but is said to be a curse. It's referred to as the Wikipedia Curse.

Recently, Wikipedia users discovered that a Wikipedia administrator going by the screen name "Essjay" and claiming to be a professor of theology was really a 24-year-old college dropout named Ryan Jordan. The New Yorker brought the fraud to light in an editorial note admitting that its 2006 magazine profile of the community had misreported Essjay's academic credentials. According to The New Yorker, neither the reporter nor Wikipedia could confirm Essjay's true identity. At issue, critics say, are thousands of articles contributed under false pretenses and Wikipedia's apparent lack of due diligence to verify the credentials of one of its trusted arbitrators. Perhaps ironically, arbitrators have the power to block contributors who abuse the site or overrule edits to posts.

In regards to how objective Wikipedia is, recently Wikipedia has been called into question because of the collaborative nature of its entries. WikiScanner (also known as Wikipedia Scanner), a tool released by Virgil Griffith in August 2007 that identifies the authors behind Wikipedia edits, revealed that people at the IP addresses of several major companies had made changes to their own or competitors' Wikipedia entries.

So why does Google have an interest in creating Knol, a better, more responsible, more reliable encyclopedia?

One just has to look at the actions of a threatening Wikipedia Jimmy Wales.
In December 2006, Jimmy Wales, announced that he was going to destroy Google.

Wales had begun working on a search engine that uses the same user-based technology as his open-access encyclopaedia.

The project was dubbed Wikiasari - a combination of wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, which is Japanese for “rummaging search”.

Wales, a 42-year-old former options trader, believed that, as the popularity of Google has grown, obvious flaws in its search engine technology had become apparent.

“Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap," said Wales.

Google founders - Larry Page and Sergey Brin heard what Wales had to say. And Wales kept repeating it over and over again as to create a steady marketing buzz for Wikipedia. What Wales did not anticipate was that Page and Brin would now take on Wikipedia.

One must realize that Wikipedia was "renting" room on Google. Wikipedia became the largest SEO - search engine optimizer spammer on Google generating tons of traffic for Wikipedia. And Wales then bit the hand that fed him.

What was Wales thinking? An options trader now taking on two of the world's most powerful geeks (not including Bill Gates.)

Google, whose motto is "Do No Evil", then created Knol. In the same manner that Google promoted and marketed Gmail through soft and highly successful Internet viral marketing, Google merely announced Knol on their Blog.

 

And Google is giving the public what they want. A respectable, accountable encyclopedia where one can easily see the source of information. And Google is even willing to pay Knol editors for their time by compensating them through an optional plan of placing Google ads on the pages they author.

Google, which is responsible for having created Google News, Google Earth, Gmail, Blogger, Web 2.0 social network Orkut, Google Maps, Picasa and acquiring YouTube is always on the move. And so far, Google has made very few mistakes.

In announcing the Google Knol encyclopedia in December 2007, Google stated that they are "encouraging people to contribute knowledge."

"The web contains an enormous amount of information, and Google has helped to make that information more easily accessible by providing pretty good search facilities," says the Google Blog. "But not everything is written nor is everything well organized to make it easily discoverable. There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it. We believe that many do not share that knowledge today simply because it is not easy enough to do that. The challenge posed to us by Larry, Sergey and Eric was to find a way to help people share their knowledge. This is our main goal."

The Google Blog continues: "The key idea behind the Knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content."

Google stated that it would provide easy-to-use tools for writing and editing, and that Google would do the rest.

Yesterday, this author wrote two Knols - one for SEO - search engine optimization and the other on Father's Rights. I found working with the Google Knol encyclopedia was easier than working with Wikipedia. In fact, as a former editor of dozens of Wikipedia articles, I can easily state that it might be an easy to read content experience on Wikipedia but for the common lay person, actually using a Wiki can be a scary experience. As such Google has made this encyclopedia as easy to contribute too as writing a simple email.

Google states: "The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing."

"Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from our AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements."

Google also announced an agreement with The New Yorker magazine which allows any author to add one cartoon per knol from The New Yorker’s extensive cartoon repository.

While Google won't admit it, Knol (http://knol.google.com), is designed to be a Wikipedia killer.
In replacing Wikipedia, Google may be burning down a forest to destroy a rampant Net disease of gossip, slander and libel. In doing so, those new, emerging green plants and tall, clean trees will bring back respectability and accountability to academic Web content.

Google is providing a warm, professional, accountable and friendly place on the Web to contribute knowledge. And in doing so without the interference of mafia like Wikipedia administrators (Wikithugs) who share political agendas, edit, delete and censor content in an anonymous, harmful and slanderous style.

 

 

The above news content was edited and SEO optimized in Israel for the Internet by the Leyden Communications Group.

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