Google has announced the knol (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html)
It looks like the knol (I guess, a unit of knowledge, although then it really ought to be a "know") is going to be another sez-who? type of encyclopaedia.
To raise a few concerns: Wikipedia has already been tarred for its basic inaccuracies. To take a trivial, but to me suggestive, example - since it is surely not contentious - the Federer entry provides a few annoyingly wrong tennis statistics. (Is it fair to extrapolate from this? Other comments suggest it is.) Never mind the plagiarism (Wikipedia's main use in the classrooms), what about the wholesale propagation of error? Those who forget their past are doomed to repeat it differently!
Worse are the numerous examples of Orwellian reality manipulation, particularly (but not only) by the great and the good. Can we really leave the truth to whoever feels strongest about it? To the companies and governments with a Chief Wiki Manipulator? To the psychotic obsessives with time and/or money on their hands?
Regarding the advertising-driven model interesting, all advertising is not bad, per se. Just look at non-state-supported TV, where the guy who buys the soap powder or BMW pays for me to watch high-value copyright content for free. Maybe the knol model offers something useful, as long as the advertising doesn't distort the message, like paid-for-by-pharmaceutical-company "scientific" journals.
Has a mechanism to edit/review/improve/disprove knol-edge been offered? It will be needed, as Wikipedia recognizes (but doesn't solve). I think this is an ethical issue and necessity.
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