{"id":113,"date":"2008-08-27T18:31:18","date_gmt":"2008-08-27T18:31:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/?p=113"},"modified":"2008-08-27T18:44:14","modified_gmt":"2008-08-27T18:44:14","slug":"forget-the-writers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/2008\/08\/27\/forget-the-writers\/","title":{"rendered":"Forget the writers."},"content":{"rendered":"

Knol is Google trying to recreate Squidoo<\/a> or Helium<\/a>, not an encyclopedia. Wikipedia is #8 on Alexa, Squidoo is #431<\/a>, Helium is #4999<\/a> and only Google knows how well Knol is actually doing. I mean, I was incredibly impressed when I first joined Wikipedia in early 2004 that it was #500. But nevertheless. At least about.com<\/a> makes #86<\/a>.<\/p>\n

(In fairness, Google has never pushed Knol as a Wikipedia killer; that’s entirely a media-created synthetic controversy.)<\/p>\n

There’s hardly a “Wikipedia replacement” that hasn’t started from trying to make a welcoming environment for authors. Wikipedia, however, is popular because it’s what readers<\/i> want. Writers are important, but way less so than the readers.<\/p>\n

I’ve seen very few Wikipedia replacements or even forks that aim primarily at creating a better resource for the reader, and leave the rest to happen. Citizendium is the only one that springs to mind — CZ is very reader-oriented, and slowly accumulating lots of good stuff. It also expressly tries for good writing, unlike Wikipedia.<\/p>\n

If readers wanted ten articles on one topic, they’d just click the first ten Google hits. It’s like metasearch engines that gave you results from ten bad pre-Google search engines in the hope you might find a damn thing, when the real answer was one search engine that didn’t suck. Tell you what, the main value of Cuil<\/a> is to explain to the kids how bad<\/i> search engines were before Google got it right. One good resource kills ten mediocre resources.<\/p>\n

Leaving the editors to battle it out to collaboratively create the one<\/i> article on a topic appears to have worked to give readers the simple quick reference site they actually want to use. Inherent unreliability and all. Discuss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Knol is Google trying to recreate Squidoo or Helium, not an encyclopedia. Wikipedia is #8 on Alexa, Squidoo is #431, Helium is #4999 and only Google knows how well Knol is actually doing. I mean, I was incredibly impressed when I first joined Wikipedia in early 2004 that it was #500. But nevertheless. At least … Continue reading “Forget the writers.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wiki"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4FmVR-1P","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":119,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions\/119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}