Re:3 reasons why Knol will beat Wikipedia
by mechanical_fish on Friday July 25, 2008 @12:04PM
(#256758)
Here's a few more:
- Knol articles aren't CC-licensed by default. So not only can't people log in and update them (a facility which, arguably, makes Wikipedia a bit too dynamic) but they can't even clone them under their own byline and make fixes. The result is going to be a bunch of sad-looking abandoned articles, like the dregs of About.com. Say what you will about Wikipedia: The thing is often up-to-date within minutes.
- If, indeed, Knol gets favorable treatment in PageRank -- even if its advantage is only slight -- people will soon figure out that it's more profitable to dump 10,000 crappy articles on Knol than to craft one perfect article and keep it updated. The ads will show up anyway. Heck, it might be more profitable to put up a page with poor content and a bunch of ads -- that way frustrated readers will click through on the ads to escape. That's how domain squatting works.
We can certainly look forward to seeing just about every Wikipedia article mirrored on Knol. The software to do that is being written right now; maybe it has already been written. Interestingly, sites filled with ads used to do that to get a lot of PageRank, but I haven't seen any of those sites on a Google search recently. I guess that might change now that Google's getting into the linkjacking business.
- Knol articles aren't CC-licensed by default. So not only can't people log in and update them (a facility which, arguably, makes Wikipedia a bit too dynamic) but they can't even clone them under their own byline and make fixes. The result is going to be a bunch of sad-looking abandoned articles, like the dregs of About.com. Say what you will about Wikipedia: The thing is often up-to-date within minutes.
- If, indeed, Knol gets favorable treatment in PageRank -- even if its advantage is only slight -- people will soon figure out that it's more profitable to dump 10,000 crappy articles on Knol than to craft one perfect article and keep it updated. The ads will show up anyway. Heck, it might be more profitable to put up a page with poor content and a bunch of ads -- that way frustrated readers will click through on the ads to escape. That's how domain squatting works.
We can certainly look forward to seeing just about every Wikipedia article mirrored on Knol. The software to do that is being written right now; maybe it has already been written. Interestingly, sites filled with ads used to do that to get a lot of PageRank, but I haven't seen any of those sites on a Google search recently. I guess that might change now that Google's getting into the linkjacking business.