Comments on my Wikipedia meet Google post on the knol project, and some time to sleep over the announcement have brought some questions on what I consider to be more significant in some ways than opensocial, android, etc etc.
Wikipedia is a social and cultural phenomenon. I love it. Some hate it. I don’t think we should see this in any way as an indictment of Wikipedia, especially when they are finally supporting CC licensing. Is Google simple trying to make clicks go to sites where they could earn ad revenue? Or is this a pre-emptive strike against the search engine Jimmy Wales is planning to release?
The other question is regarding content licensing. If the content is not Creative Commons licensed, it would be unfortunate. I presume the folks at Google are good friends with Larry Lessig? Perhaps there could be some lobbying done to get CC adopted by the knol project. All the reasons why open science is a good thing apply here as well. Information has to be “open” and CC provides an attribution ready, sharing ready framework to provide portable, open content.
Which brings me down to something that we weren’t talking about last night. As I said in my post, video and elsewhere. I could care less about Squidoo and Mahalo, but Wikipedia is a treasure. Can Wikipedia and the knol project co-exist? If the scope of knol remains low into drilled down expert content, I believe yes, since that is not the appropriate content for Wikipedia in my opinion, which should remain a general source. In fact a win for Wikipedia would be if material from Wikipedia ended up being the seed material for many knols.
How this will all play out remains to be seen. It’s still in private testing, so it might never see the light of day. It could fail miserably (and a lack of CC would keep me away as a contributor), or it could change the way we consume information. We’ll be watching.
Knols the morning after. A question or two
Comments on my Wikipedia meet Google post on the knol project, and some time to sleep over the announcement have brought some questions on what I consider to be more significant in some ways than opensocial, android, etc etc.
Wikipedia is a social and cultural phenomenon. I love it. Some hate it. I don’t think we should see this in any way as an indictment of Wikipedia, especially when they are finally supporting CC licensing. Is Google simple trying to make clicks go to sites where they could earn ad revenue? Or is this a pre-emptive strike against the search engine Jimmy Wales is planning to release?
The other question is regarding content licensing. If the content is not Creative Commons licensed, it would be unfortunate. I presume the folks at Google are good friends with Larry Lessig? Perhaps there could be some lobbying done to get CC adopted by the knol project. All the reasons why open science is a good thing apply here as well. Information has to be “open” and CC provides an attribution ready, sharing ready framework to provide portable, open content.
Which brings me down to something that we weren’t talking about last night. As I said in my post, video and elsewhere. I could care less about Squidoo and Mahalo, but Wikipedia is a treasure. Can Wikipedia and the knol project co-exist? If the scope of knol remains low into drilled down expert content, I believe yes, since that is not the appropriate content for Wikipedia in my opinion, which should remain a general source. In fact a win for Wikipedia would be if material from Wikipedia ended up being the seed material for many knols.
How this will all play out remains to be seen. It’s still in private testing, so it might never see the light of day. It could fail miserably (and a lack of CC would keep me away as a contributor), or it could change the way we consume information. We’ll be watching.
Technorati Tags: Creative Commons, Google, Wikipedia, knol project