Wikipedia and Wikia are Dead. Google Just Killed Them

Google announced last night they are starting a project called knol that will allow anyone to create wiki-like pages on topics. In particular, Google is encouraging people who know a particular subject to write an "authoritative" article about it. The search engine will not vet any of the content, however, they will prioritize the most credible entries and rank them first in search results. It remains unclear how Google is measuring credibility - a scary thought.

Still, with this move Google is clearly targeting Wikipedia (which is perhaps their biggest rival) and quite possibly is trying to ensure that Jimmy Wales' forthcoming social search engine, Wikia, is dead on arrival. Consider the timing of this announcement. It comes just days before Wikia is set to launch in beta and when Google doesn't even have any site we can poke at.

My initial take on this is that knols are going to kill Wikipedia - but it will take time. This theory, however, hinges on whether people actually start creating knols, but I believe they will. Here are several reasons why Wikipedia and Wikia are dead ...

1) The fame factor - Google prioritizes knols over Wikipedia

In theory, Google no longer needs to rely on Wikipedia for fresh content. The search engine will prioritize content from its own system and rank the most credible articles more highly than anything in the open source encyclopedia. This alone will encourage people to add to the commons. It will take time though for Google to reach a critical mass with its knols. Do not underestimate the power of fame.

2) Official sources and experts are welcomed, not spurned.

I love the openness of Wikipedia. However, I have long chided its lack of openness toward corporations and other sources of authority. As much as we would like to think people don't want corporations playing in our sandbox, most average users welcome organization and multiple perspectives. This is why we still have a thriving profession called editors. When it comes to corporations, Google is open, Wikpedia is closed.

3) Infinite Resources

Wikipedia has been trying to raise money for a long time now. Meanwhile, Google has infinite resources and the most powerful marketing vehicle on the planet to push it.

I am excited about the launch of this initiative. It is my hope that corporations and organizations that play by the rules will be able to unleash their subject matter experts to add content to the commons in a way the community accepts. There's no reason they should be excluded, provided there is some degree of counter balance.

What's even more exciting is that it reinforces the role of PR in this new wild and wooly online world. Now granted, we will have to play by the knol rules and be transparent. Still, this is all very exciting and in the process it might even get Wikipedia to change some too - for the better.

Comments

[Thomas Marban]

now what about mahalo?

[Steve Rubel]

Oh it's a threat to Mahalo as well. However, I do believe they come at it differently and that Mahalo will begin to focus more on news and current events.

[Armando Alves]

And don't forget:

At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

Altough Mahalo shares revenue, wikipedia doesn't. A clear advantage to snatching authors.

[Daan]

What about the fact that Google will share revenue with the author? Wouldn't that be a reason for people to start writing a knol instead a wiki-entry?

[Amit Agarwal]

I will probably add about.com to this list as well.

[Lou Paglia]

Perhaps we are in the midst of a new saying:

"For whom the bell tolls, it tolls from knols."

[Max]

If I may dissent here...

Every time Google rolls out a new product, people rush to say "competitor xyz is dead," but frankly this hasn't really happened.

Google Checkout didn't kill Paypal
Google Base didn't kill Craigslist or Ebay
Google Docs didn't kill MS Office
Froogle didn't kill all the shopping searches out there
the list goes on...

Even Gmail, one of Google's most successful products, hasn't achieved the dominance many claimed it would... The same is true of Google Reader... etc

So, when "Knol" doesn't kill Wikipedia, probably the most popular content site online, don't be surprised.

Wikipedia, with millions of pages of content, has a huge head start. And as the default site for information on pretty much any topic, its lack of ads will always give it a leg up as people use the site with the assumption that it has not been optimized, adjusted, skewed, etc to suit contextual ads. That won't be true of Knol.

[Jeppis]

Mahalo is a non-starter. With the concept that they have, one would think there really is no spam. First search BLAM - spam. Last search.

As for Knol, the analysis is spot on, bye bye wikipedia. The money factor of difference is the one that will drive people away from it.

[Jay Meattle]

Steve, your first point is key, and probably the #1 driver.

Wikipedia (50M+ uniques) tends to be result #2 or #3 for A LOT of Google search results, it makes sense for Google to want to keep some of those people within the Google ecosystem.

Traffic chart: http://hepguru.com/blog/2007/12/14/wikipedia-stats-unique-visitors-knols/

[James O'Hagan]

Two Words:

Google Video.

[Shel Holtz]

According to the Google post, anybody will be able to SUBMIT edits, presumably which the author will approve or not. That's not community editing, so the appeal is entirely different. One of the reasons I usually trust most Wikipedia entries is the knowledge that it has been revised and corrected by the many knowledgable people who view it. The content on knol will be entirely controlled by the author. As a knowledge resource, that has less appeal to me.

I also agree with Max, by the way. Google dominates in search and is a secondary player in nearly everything else it undertakes (a point underscored in a BusinessWeek article not too long ago). I wouldn't count Wikipedia out just yet.

[Julius]

I agree with Max and Shel, and I think you may come to regret having written this entry. (It seems likely to end up on a "worst prediction" list.)

Wikipedia is special precisely because many people edit and contribute to a single article. I don't care how smart an expert is, no single person is smarter than the hundreds or thousands of experts that contribute to a high profile Wikipedia article. It gets back to the wisdom of crowds.

The last point is that Wikipedia is alive, where Knol sounds more like traditional media. Wikipedia has up to the minute information about big current events. Knols sound more like blog entries or newspaper articles -- they will probably be written once, and then never edited again.

Lastly, I will leave you with one final thought: What makes this better than About.com?

[Dario Salvelli]

Uhm..share revenue: if knol make,this is a bad things. An enciclopedya have to be free and without money around..

[Josh Bernoff]

Since when does new+google=unstoppable?

This could become very interesting. But it could also become known as "Self Promotion R Us" or "Bullshi**er central." Community editing has its value -- it results in sometimes bland but usually balanced results. This will be much more interesting but not necessarily factual entries -- they'll be biased if the author is biased.

[Alan Morrison]

Steve,

Nice post, and your headline is definitely an attention getter. I've linked to it in a post of my own that ponders Wikipedia's value in providing conformed topic entries. I'm just wondering if you've considered all the major variables here.

[zota]

Wikipedia is trying to be a public encyclopedia of collectively edited knowledge. Knol is an attempt to keep Wikipedia from totally dominating search results. Two very different goals.

About.com is dead. Wikipedia is just fine.

[Mike Bennett]

I'm not sure this will work? The great advantage of Wikipedia is that it is (at its best) the results of many people (sort o agreeing on something.

Whereas knol will result in many articles about one subject. And each will contribute one (possibly highly biased) view-point. But to get all the info, you'll have to read several articles which won't have been argued over like Wikipedia. And at the end of it all, you won't know who to believe.

[Teresa Valdez Klein]

If I understand your argument here, Steve, it seems that you're saying that people will flee from a free, open source wiki that has tons of momentum and community backing to one that has a top-down, undisclosed method for ranking credibility and an affinity for corporations?

Boy are you wrong on this one. Online communities go where they feel like they have control. Wikipedia's biggest asset is its community.

And I don't buy that the advertising rev share -- as cool as that is -- will drive people away from Wikipedia. Nobody writes articles on Wikipedia for money. They do it because they care.

Until Google figures out how to leverage that passion, knols won't touch Wikipedia.

Also, I agree with Max.

[iAnon]

I agree with Max, Google has launched several 'this will kill the competition' projects and I have yet to see one completly succeed.

Also lets not forget, Wikipedia was launched to provide a free on line encyclopedia and I don't recall them asking for certain top positions in Google. That came as a result of Google's algorithm. So why should they care if Google decides to change that.

I do believe knol will be an interesting project but certainly not a 'killer'.

[Todd W.]

Are you sure the dead body here isn't Google's? Seems this effort is more dangerous to the value of Google's core offering - search - than it is to any of its so-called competitors. What you're implying is that Google will substitute some other way of evaluating authority for Page Rank. Favoring a Knol author instead of Wikipedia or any other freely available Internet source (whatever ranks highest) is counter to Google's underlying principles. That would erode the value of its search results.

[traffic maps]

I agree with Max, Google has launched several 'this will kill the competition' projects and I have yet to see one completly succeed.

[Kevin Gamble]

Good post.

I think this will be very successful regardless of the impact on Wikipedia.

I didn't see anything in the Google announcement about "how" content is produced. It is certainly easy to collaborate on content development right now through Google Docs. I can't imagine that when Google finally launches Jotspot that it won't also "publish" to Knol.

[garg]

Yikes. That's a very sensationalist headline.

As long as Google does not give special priority to a knol and does not unfairly rank a knol higher than everything else then it's just another page.

Has Google said anything about a knol being ranked above everything else? The only thing they may do is share more revenue on knol pages.

Google is finally getting the jump on something that has to do with social media. They lost when they competed with Facebook, Facebook API, YouTube, Yahoo Answers. Now threats from Mahalo.com and Wikia were looming and they are leveraging the power of their search engine to keep from being beaten again.

and Wikia and Mahalo never had any big chance of beating Google at Search any way. Now they'll just have a tougher time competing with Social Content Generated Search.

And since when is a Knol a "wiki-like page"? A wiki is collaborative and editable by almost anyone. A knol is created by a single author and the content seems to be questioned and rated by members. Wikia and Mahalo are in danger but not wikipedia.

[Kat]

Wikipedia will only die off if they don't find a way to survive, which may or may not happen. Personally, I'd hate to see Google kill them off for the very reasons you point out. Google has an advantage in power and searchability and the last thing I want to see is loss of competition, in which everyone benefits. But I guess we shall see.

[Prokofy Neva]

I'm so glad that *something* is going to help kill off Wikipedia, but it's a problem that Google is doing it, and not natural attrition. The lifeblood of Wikipedia was all those hits that Google gave its pages in the number one spot on practically every search, where, due to the essential Google laziness problem, because it *did* churn up first, you then clicked on it, and perpetuated the problem -- you didn't click because it was authoritative, but simply because it was there.

While it might take a while for the knols to perk up to the top of Google (if Google is honest about not artificially boosting them), precisely because they will be made up of real experts and as you say real institutions, instead of anonymous and obsessive freaks, they will acquire more hits the honest way.

That still leaves us with the problem of Google itself...

[Mike Reynolds]

Largely TBD at the moment. It will be interesting to see if Google decides to tackle every possible topic or if the focus on some narrow niches.

[Earl]

DIE wikipedia DIE! DIE, DIE, DIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!! HAHAHAHAHAHHAHA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!! MOOOOHOOOHOOOHAHAHAHAHAHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! Someone has finally come to rid of us of the most garbage site on the net. Albeit google is probably the reason wikipedia got to the top and helped them in their evil ways, but at least their taking them out. DIE WIKIPEDIA! DIE!

[JamesBruni]

Such typical Edelman/Rubel PR BS. Sure, everyone's going to flock to Google Knols to get that "corporation" viewpoint that's utterly lacking in Wikipedia. Business Week was right on target in criticizing you for posting this insight.

[jon wilke]

Maybe this will be easier to use than Wikipedia's code. You need to take a class to get a good Wikipedia article posted the first time. Google always makes it simple for end-users.

[Tony]

This will kill about.com, I am not sure about wikipedia.

[Mark Moran]

Knol is an admission that search engine results very often do not provide users with answers to their questions. Knol is intended to provide answers, albeit from a single source. The Web let you quickly access multiple sources of information about almost anything. But most users don't know how to sift millions of results to find the best sources - many do not review more than the first five results, and to Google's chagrin and envy, Wikipedia is usually among those five. This is what has given rise to the second-generation of human-powered search alternatives, including my own [findingDulcinea], each of which in its own way distills the Internet through a filter of human judgment, and provides the "endorsed" results that many users think they are getting now from search engines.

[quirkyalone]

I think Google will artificially boosting them for sure, using links in SERPS like "see a knol about ".

I think Google's idea is great, and no one is dominating this niche yet. However, it will not kill Wikipedia, but make it less relevant (which is a good thing IMHO).

Regarding Wikia, I believe it still has a chance, when executed correctly.

[Jay, writer MemberSpeed.com]

Nothing is definite yet but Google does present a threat. I love Wikipedia although Wikia has had some problems in the past. I just heard from another blog that Wikia has just gotten 1000 servers added. So maybe the war isn't over yet. Although I love the layout Google has, I can't help but cheer for Wikipedia.

[jood42]

If Google doesn't factor in resolutions for the problems About.com created for itself (articles becoming merely link lists, unreadable page design dominated by ads, no public contribution to the topic under discussion), Knol will be headed to the same trash bin.

I find it very worrisome that authors will compete on subjects the general public may know nothing about, with the public deciding which article is "best". If i write five paragraphs of friendly-sounding drek and post a couple of racy pictures on Disorders of the Thymus, I could easily out-score a highly accurate and up-to-date 7,000 word treatise on the subject by an expert in the field. While that's certainly democratic, it doesn't by any stretch of the imagination lead to a good store of quality information.

There are problems with Wikipedia too, but I don't consider a lack of corporate representation to be one of them. There are plenty of venues available for marketing and promotion, and I don't think a publicly-maintained encyclopedia should be one of them.

[Nihiltres]

(I tried to post this a while ago, but was inexplicably blocked by the spam filter as a bot. Go figure. )

I've seen an overwhelming response of this kind throughout the blogosphere, and even somewhat the news, over this, and I'm not really all that worried, even as a dedicated Wikipedian. Yes, it's possible that knols could have some "Wikipedia-killing" power, but I find that somewhat unlikely.

First of all, Google claims that they will not give special value to knols in PageRank. Although that's currently unverifiable, if so it cements Wikipedia's lead as a starter.

Second, you say that "official sources and experts are welcomed, not spurned", a statement which doesn't deal with the knol's proposed system for experts - or lack thereof. Just as John Q. Public may operate a blog alongside an expert's blog, so too may he create a competing knol. Experts are expected simply to create reliable content that rises above that of the average contributor - which isn't all that far from Wikipedia's position of welcoming experts, but requiring them to meet the same standards of sourcing (and avoidance of self-promotion [which requires not sourcing oneself]) as any user.

Thirdly, "the fame factor" is minimal - how is this different in terms of the fame factor from YouTube or Blogger? Individual pages have to compete like the web pages they are, meaning that it's simply an easier way for one person to publish a web page. I can imagine that the competition in some fields may make only the best knols the top content. This already happens on Wikipedia, where some of the most controversial and popular topics are polished by repeated disagreements and refreshingly neutral in tone. In others, especially minor, overlooked topics, however, the sparsity of knols will probably make Wikipedia's aggregated content most attractive regardless of whether or not knols knock Wikipedia out of the top slot.

My other concern is that knols encourage competition between articles - this means bias can run parallel to opposing bias. I shudder to think of the flamewars that will undoubtedly erupt when one social position is advanced over another in ranking - can you imagine what topics like evolution or George W. Bush or abortion will look like on the apparently unregulated knols as opposed to Wikipedia with its neutral-point-of-view policy? Perhaps it will succeed in this respect - but I doubt it.

All in all, I am inclined to think that this trumpeting that "Wikipedia is dead" is a little ahead of its time. Wikipedia has weathered many crises, and despite Google's virtually endless resources, I am inclined to think that many elements of the Wikipedia model absent in Knol's - the dynamic, collaborative community excluded by Knol's author control and page competition, the neutral point of view as an idea ignored in Knol, and the loss of credibility as people decide to monetize their articles - will hurt it (Knol).

What I'm really wondering is how long it will be before I will have to use the legal power of my rights under the GFDL to send some Knol author a DMCA takedown request for copying, without attribution, a Wikipedia article that I've helped write that he is claiming as his own work.

[David Scott Lewis]

This could be interesting. I've encouraged Mahalo to offshore much of their work and Google could do the same with this, offshoring a first take and then letting "experts" do the final editing. It's kind of like what we do in the solar sector: Modules and collectors are manufactured in China, but final assembly and QA/QC is done in Spain; hence, the products qualify as European, but we can sell close to the China price. There are a lot of smart, English-capable research types not only in India, but in China. Yes, they'll often write in Chinglish, but they could do a lot of the leg work to help create lots of content. However, as I type this, it seems like it may benefit Mahalo more than Google. Time will tell ...

[messels]

this is a horrible idea! are they really planning to do this? the only reason wikipedia even works is becuase it has community editing! once you make it a free-for-all [again], we're just back to 1999 with information in a gazillion places.
wikipedia's not going anywhere.
google should just focus on search but it has to justify the high-flying sticker price by [presumably] conveying the idea that they're entering new markets (which means that a higher forward P/E is warranted--even thought it's not).

sheesh, when's goog going to figure it out: it's time to pay a dividend, not waste resources on entering markets it can't even keep up with!

[Matt Carolan]

Thought-provoking post. You've been reading your Sun Tzu apparently. The battle is won even before it is fought? I didn't read that, I just cribbed it from Wall Street. :-)

Anyway, to paraphrase another military strategist, G.K. Chesteron, no Russian soldier would die face down in the mud for a warm water port for the motherland. That's why Stalin opened the churches.

Wikipedia is driven by a love of truth. I doubt the same fervor will be there to aid the colossus. If people get paid, they will be mercenaries.

Although, as I noted in a recent post on my blog at mattcarolan.blogspot.com, a Wikipedia Google content alliance would have been good to beef up the lousy quality of information on YouTube about the posted videos. So, now, if Google integrates knol posts with YouTube you will have an even more watchable and readable property.

Thanks for interesting stuff as always.

[Matt Carolan]

Here's the link to my recent blog item about Google Wikimedia. Thanks.

http://mattcarolan.blogspot.com/2007/10/youtube-with-wikimedia-chaser.html