Yostivanich

Knol is a ridicu­lous scheme by Google to cre­ate a Wikipedia onto it’s own, except one that’s worse. Knol takes the idea that there is actu­ally a sin­gle per­son out there who is an expert on a field and uses them to write an arti­cle on it, and through every­body else going, “Hey, great Knol” and makes it the Knol on that sub­ject. Google now has about 100,000 of these pub­lished in about 5 months of being open to the pub­lic.

Okay, so maybe it isn’t such a crazy idea, except for one lit­tle prob­lem. Have you ever found a sin­gle per­son who is THE defin­tive author­ity on a sub­ject, no mat­ter how nar­row? When was the last per­son you ever met or heard of some­one who really was THE expert in some­thing? Any­body heard of that person?

One bet­ter, last time you were on a col­lege cam­pus and heard a pro­fes­sor pro­claim that this text­book had absolutelty no errors in it and was to be the author­ity on a sub­ject (and it wasn’t the professor’s own book)?

Both of these has never hap­pened and never will. One per­son can not and does not con­tain all the infor­ma­tion to be THE expert in a sub­ject. You can be an expert in a field, for instance a Doc­tor­ate of French His­tory, is an expert of French His­tory. Not how­ever, this doc­tor­ate is not the only expert nor even the last remain­ing expert, there are oth­ers who are experts, other peo­ple will build upon her/his work in the future and become an expert.

The crowds will make mis­takes, but at the very least the col­lec­tive intel­li­gence of dozens or hun­dreds of peo­ple work­ing away on an arti­cle to make it bet­ter, pro­vides a col­lec­tive wis­dom that Google will never get with it’s experiment.

No thank you, Knol, I will stick with Wikipedia.