Anything anyone else can do, we can do better.
That seems to be how Google thinks, and, to be fair, they seem to be right most of the time. The latest wheeze is a Wikipedia rival under the code name Knol, launched last week without any fanfare at all bar a blog post.
Given the influence of Wikipedia (one of the ten most-visited websites in the world) it seems inevitable that someone else would see more opportunity in that area, and Google's move comes after a steady drip of negative stories about Wikipedia - most recently a secret of cabal of editors.
Jack Schofield over on the Guardian Technology blog has a summary of the story to date; it's an attempt to better Wikipedia, Citizendium, About.com and Squidoo and to monetise what could be very hefty traffic if this takes off. I'm not quite as sceptical as Jack about the reliability of Wikipedia. A lot of the time, particularly with very niche entries, the information is edited up to the standard of the bets contributor rather than edited down to the worst. And as no-one should rely on one sole source anyway, it's just one part of a bigger picture.
What makes Wikipedia so attractive is the combination of breadth and depth of information. It's incredibly easy to use. How accurate that information is is another matter, but it is interesting to watch the development of trust mechanisms on sites like Mahalo. No doubt Google is watching those too.
I noted Jason Goldman, former Googler and now at Twitter, who points out that part of the motivation is likely to be all the "unmonetisable traffic" that Google sends to Wikipedia.
"The further justification for Knol is "Who can trust all that crap on Wikipedia?" Google is fundamentally an academic institution and part of that ethos is that things aren't really "good" unless peer reviewed. The concept of peer review is central to how work is done inside Google and that basically works as far as it goes. Unfortunately, that ethos has extended to the way Google views content on the web.
"Sergey once asked the Blogger team how Blogger was going to compete with the New York Times. Even though our page views exceeded those of the NYT, the point I think he was making was "When are you gonna produce something authoritative that lots of people will accept as good." Blogger's answer was "Huh?" Knol's answer is peer review."
Mike Arrington on TechCrunch thought it over for a while, and adds that as well as the monetising traffic issue, Google might have a been a bit riled by all the press about the open source search project being developed by Wikipedia's commercial sibling, Wikia. And the really cunning thing here is paying the contributors:
"Wikipedia gets massive support from the community because it's non-profit. Google can't compete with that, so they're focusing on putting the authors' names in lights and giving them a little cash on the side, too. That should help them pull some heavy Wikipedia contributors over to their project.
"Very soon we are going to see a lot of Wikipedia content moving wholesale to Knol. Wikipedia content is basically free to use, redistribute, copy, whatever, under the GNU license...
"So, in a way, Google has found a way to monetize Wikipedia content after all."
That said, it might just flop, like Google Base. But we'll see. Weirdly, there are no comments on the Google Blog (which seems a little Web.Backwards) and there's no indication of the public launch date either.
Technorati Tags: Google, JasonGoldman, Knol, MikeArrington, TechCrunch, Twitter, Wikipedia
