July 29, 2008

Knol: Wikipedia’s Doom?

Christian Decker wrote this in the wee hours:

While I was ranting some days ago about Wikipedia being completely bureaucratic and it being overly complex to get your knowledge, I’ve completely overseen the newest buzz around Google: Knol.

As soon as I realized that there might be an alternative to Wikipedia, I rushed over to knol.google.com and created my account, and was immediately frustrated by the lack of Articles. While knol surely has some nice improvements over Wikipedia (read WYSIWYG-Editor and better author-profiles), the real treasure of Wikipedia is the huge amount of topics and articles that cover about every aspect a normal user may need,and in some cases even for in depth studies, like for me it really helps me studying, where my professors didn’t explain that well. Sure, offering the authors some share of the revenue by letting them register their AdSense accounts with their knol accounts will push a lot of users towards knol, it will be a long while before they reach the level of completeness of Wikipedia.

Completeness is the next thing I have to criticise on knol: while it is possible for anybody to create his own knols (that’s what google calls it’s posts) on any topic, there is no guarantee that the topics will be covered in a neutral way and linked amongst them sufficiently, which is a major strength of Wikipedia on the other hand.

Also the knols will not be merged into one revised, corrected and there will be no generally acknowledged version which is the reference. It will just be a collection on articles floating around, like any other web page, and not a consolidated repository of knowledge, which should be the goal when trying to compete with Wikipedia.

Last but not least, I think, there will be a run to write only the most popular articles, with pretty useless content just to grab your attention, driving you to the authors page, to give him an impression on his Ads. Partly this can already be seen already, try searching for popular terms for wikipedia, music or knol.

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July 19, 2008

Wikipedia frustration

Christian Decker wrote this terribly early in the morning:
Apparently I’m not the only one frustrated with the rules and relevance checks of Wikipedia “officials”:

The reason for my frustration is that I tried twice to add an article about a popular band in switzerland to the german Wikipedia version, but twice it was considered irrelevant. No problem so far, except that I was told that once they’d publish a CD and have 5′000 records sold they would be relevant… but hey, that’s bureaucratic germany… they can change their mind whenever they want.

So the article still isn’t online, though Des Koenigs Halunken have met all of the criteria to be in there… call it fair…

[Thanks for http://www.socialsignal.com/ for the Picture]

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December 7, 2007

Nazi symbolism on Wikipedia

Christian Decker wrote this just before lunchtime:
This is typical for Germany. Always afraid to face their past and being in any way connected to it. Trying to hide it behind a hypocritical facade suing whoever gets too close and tries to discuss it:

There’s been no shortage of stories lately alleging that Wikipedia moderators have fascist tendencies, but a new case goes one step further. A German politician has filed charges against Wikipedia alleging that the worlds most famous UGC site promotes Nazism.

Katina Schubert, a deputy leader of the Left Party (Die Linke) told reporters that she had filed the charge on the grounds that Wikipedia’s German site contained too much Nazi symbolism with a particular fetish towards the Hitler Youth movement.

Schubert told Reuters (via SMH) that “The extent and frequency of the symbols on it goes beyond what is needed for documentation and political education…This isn’t about restricting freedom of opinion, it’s about examining what the limits are.”

Schubert went on to claim that there may be a Nazi plot afoot on Wikipedia itself: “There are signs neo-Nazis are trying to take advantage of such structures, and this needs to be stopped.”

Wikipedia Germany denied the allegations, saying that the imagery used was used for educational purposes. Use of Nazi symbols except for educational purposes is illegal in Germany.

And I’m not saying so because I sympathize with neo-Nazis, being german myself I’m convinced that we can’t just cover it all up, and prohibit everything, we have to liften the veil of secrecy the last generations have put on history. By hushing it all up we make the neo-Nazi even more attracting to young people.

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