Google to create its own version of Wikipedia
Rough Type’s Nicholas Carr reports that Google has created a semi knockoff of Wikipedia called Knol. “The big distinction with Wikipedia is that Knol relies on individual authors rather than ‘the crowd,’” Carr writes. “Each article, or ‘knol,’ will be signed and owned by the person who writes it, and articles on the same subject will compete with one another for viewer’s eyes. In contrast, Wikipedia builds a single version of each article in a communal way with many edits by anonymous contributors.”
This won’t be as successful as Wikipedia because it doesn’t cater to the long-tail editors.
For instance, I’m what you would call a casual Wikipedia editor. Every now and then I’ll be reading a Wikipedia article about something I actually know something about, and if I see an error or I have a quick sentence to add, I add it. This separates me from the hard-core Wikipedians who create entries from scratch and contribute to them heavily. I would argue, though, that the long tail editors are just as important.
With Knol, only the hard-core editors will contribute, while people like me, who don’t really have any interest in putting a lot of work into the entry, won’t be able to contribute at all.
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I completely agree and I would like to add, that I understand (to some extent) the role of the author in the blogosphere. But I’m wondering, how its existence in collaborative projects (like wikis) will help aggregating information correctly. I find, that the strength of wikis and such similar projects is indirect control, self-organization, diversity and independence. The existence of an author(ity) raises this strength.