Knol
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| Article platform | |
| languages | English, Arabic, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Hebrew, Japanese |
| operator | Google Inc. |
| items | > 700,000 |
| Registration | required |
| On-line | July 23, 2008 (beta version) (currently offline (since 2012)) |
| http://knol.google.com/ | |
Knol was an online service provided by Google Inc. Registered authors could create articles called Knols that could be read publicly. The name Knol was derived from the English word knowledge . The project started on July 23, 2008, and since October 30, 2008 a German-language portal has also been available. The project was discontinued on May 1, 2012.
Development history
Knol was announced on December 13, 2007 and a beta version went online on July 23, 2008, initially in English. The spiritual father of Knol is the Israeli computer scientist Udi Manber. According to the official Google blog , Cedric Dupont was the product manager and Michael McNally was the software developer for Knol.
Knol has continued to develop since then. After Google parted ways with a number of projects in late 2008 and early 2009, it was speculated that Knol would be one of the next projects that Google would “ax”. Two days after Google stopped six of its projects (including the “Google Notebook” and the “Google Video” upload function), Google countered rumors on its official blog that Knol would be closed. The occasion was the publication of the 100,000. Knols.
Google announced on November 22, 2011 that as of April 30, 2012 Knol will no longer be publicly readable. Existing data could be downloaded until October 1, 2012, after which the service was completely closed. Articles could be transferred to the Annotum project .
Function and principles
Working principle
Knol's basic principle was that each article should be written by a single author. Deviating from this default setting, however, an article could contain up to ten “owners” and up to ten “authors”. The author could also decide to moderate the article for others to edit or to open it completely freely. Other users could suggest changes to an article as well as comment and rate it. The commentary was similar to that of a blog .
It was also possible for different authors to create articles on the same topic. If so, how users rate the posts should result in the top-rated article appearing first.
Processing options
Common text and paragraph formatting was possible, images could be integrated and text and background colors could be selected. Edits with HTML can also be inserted. In contrast to Wikipedia, no internal hyperlinks could be used in Knol , and there were no category functions for the respective article. External links, however, could be integrated into the Knol articles without any problems. It was also possible to import Word files (doc), Excel tables (xls), text files and PDF files.
Content guidelines
A topic should be treated as completely as possible within a Knol article. Certain content was not permitted within Knol - pornography, for example, was prohibited and also discriminatory content or statements that incited violence against others. Journal entries were also undesirable. In contrast to encyclopedias, advice, life aids, courses, self-portrayal and own research were also permitted. On Knol it was read that the portal is also a means of public relations , e.g. B. wanted companies to post articles about their commercial products. The Knol guidelines ("Things to do") urged the authors to express their personal opinion in the articles, as they were responsible for the article with their own name. Articles that violated guidelines could be "flagged". H. be reported.
Author orientation
With the policy of publishing articles marked by name, Google promised itself that proven experts would make their knowledge available - be it to strengthen their reputation as experts, be it out of vanity or economic interests. If they so wished, the authors were presented in Knol with their surname, first name, occupation, subject area and portrait photo.
There was an opportunity for authors to receive a financial share in the Google AdSense advertisements displayed next to their articles . A search function automatically determined whether more than 50% of the content was already available on the Internet. If this was the case, this was indicated and sometimes had the consequence that the AdSense advertising was omitted (for example, if the content was at least 50% congruent with Wikipedia articles).
The authors could exercise their copyright unrestrictedly and exclusively, or optionally place their contributions under three different Creative Commons licenses (“Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License”, “Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Noncommercial License” or “Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 "). Authors always kept control of their article. You could invite each other to review the articles and work collaboratively if desired .
In a bar next to the article, five more Knols by the author and Knols by other authors with similar content were displayed. A search function made it possible to search for Knols in all languages. Both the ten articles with the highest "click rate" and the authors with the most "clicked" articles were listed on the Korean portal. In addition, the web links of articles by recognized authors were set with the attribute “Follow” instead of “ Nofollow ”.
Expert debates
Expert debates on current topics offered the opportunity to actively participate in the discussions. The topics of the respective debates were proposed and coordinated in the associated forums. The expert debates could be rated and commented on by the Knol users. Google-Knol also encouraged people to write full reviews or to suggest changes to the author of the debate pages.
The expert debates were added to Google Knol in mid-October 2008 when Knol articles performed unexpectedly poorly in search results. Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read Write Web made sense because, with the US presidential election, millions would take note of these debates and thereby learn about Knol.
reception
In the beginning, Knol was often perceived in the media as a competitor to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia . The evaluations differ. Later on, Knol was primarily viewed as another, complementary format, the success or failure of which would be determined by time and users. Google itself did not see its platform as a Wikipedia competitor. The project manager Cedric Dupont disagreed with concerns about preferring Knol articles within the search engine Google .
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales suspected in the Wall Street Journal that the website would come up with "many individual opinions instead of lexicon content". Florence Devouard (Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation until July 2008), on the other hand, commented on financial issues: “Knol is probably our greatest threat since Wikipedia was founded. I really mean the biggest. "
Spiegel author Frank Patalong, on the other hand, assessed Knol as more of a competitor to specialist journals and compares Knol with a database for monographs . Spiegel Online author Konrad Lischka particularly emphasizes the similarity to existing author formats such as About.com and the German Suite101.de - there, however, “authors have to apply”. Florian Rötzer wrote in Telepolis among other things: "Without a real bracket, Knol will not become an encyclopedia". In the same magazine, the author Helmut Merschmann fears surreptitious advertising and contract work from the industry. J. Gross, author of the Süddeutsche Zeitung , also criticized surreptitious advertising, “half-knowledge” and plagiarism, especially in the case of medical articles. There is no “clear separation of health information and public relations”.
Concerning freedom of expression , some extensive concerns have been expressed. Danny Sullivan warned that, if successful, Knol could be an opportunity for Google to oust other content providers and competitors in the search engine market.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Knol - archive team . In: Archiveteam.org . Retrieved January 14, 2015.
- ↑ NRAO: About Knol: Goal of Knol: Knol Authors 100,000 - 1 million Knols - Top 100 website . March 11, 2012. Retrieved January 14, 2015.
- ↑ a b Google Throws Open Rival for Wikipedia - Anon Authors Discouraged ( Memento from July 24, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Steven Levy, Wired , July 23, 2008
- ^ " Knol is open to everyone " , official Google blog, from July 23, 2008
- ↑ Google Axes Dodgeball, Jaiku, Video and More Jason Kincaid, TechCrunch , January 14, 2009
- ↑ Official Google Blog: 100,000th knol published , January 16, 2009
- ↑ http://annotum.org/
- ↑ Official Google Blog November 22, 2011: More spring cleaning out of season
- ↑ Wave, Knol, Gears: Google continues to delete on heise.de from November 23, 2011
- ↑ Knol Content Policy ( Memento from August 19, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Google Knol Is Live Google Blogoscoped, July 23, 2008
- ^ Knol Debates ( Memento from July 21, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Knol Debates - Vote ( Memento from July 28, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Google: "Knol Debates: See both sides, get involved"
- ↑ Marshall Kirkpatrick: "Google Drops Some Knowledge on the Financial Crisis" ( Memento of the original from October 10, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Computer image: Knol: Wikipedia alternative started by Google
- ↑ Stern: Google's Knol is “not a Wikipedia killer” from July 24, 2008
- ^ Open letter from Florence Devouard dated December 17, 2007.
- ↑ Spiegel Online: Google draws a wide berth around Wikipedia from December 14, 2007
- ↑ Spiegel Online: My knowledge for all of July 24, 2008
- ↑ Telepolis: Google's Anti-Wikipedia of July 23, 2008
- ↑ Telepolis : "Ade socialism" from Aug. 4, 2008
- ^ Süddeutsche Zeitung: Surreptitious advertising in the lexicon of October 8, 2008
- ↑ Wired: Google's Units of Knowledge May Raise Conflict of Interest by Betsy Schiffman of December 14, 2007
- ^ New York Times: Wikipedia Competitor Being Tested by Google by Miquel Helft, December 15, 2007
- ^ Andy Greenberg: Google's Know-It-All Project ( English ) In: Forbes . December 14, 2007. Archived from the original on December 17, 2007. Retrieved January 16, 2015.
