- Why a Saudi blogger faces a possible death sentence for three tweets
- America's big wealth gap: Is it good, bad, or irrelevant?
- Xi Jinping, future Chinese president, faces test on first White House visit (+video)
- Iran accuses Israel of setting up attacks on its own diplomats
- Valentine's Day: cost of romance rising for flower delivery, 4 other things
- No budget? No problem! The strange politics behind a budgetless America.
Google developing Wikipedia rival
The search giant's 'knol' project will offer encyclopedia entries with bylines and advertisements.
(Page 2 of 2)
He's not the only one. Writing in Wired, reporter Betsy Schiffman asks an expert "whether Google can rank competitors objectively given that the search company may have a financial incentive to keep Google-owned content at the top of its search results."
Skip to next paragraph-
Audio: Eoin O'Carroll discusses the flexible copyright licenses of Wikipedia and Google's knol project.
"At the end of the day, there's a fundamental conflict between the business Google is in and its social goals," says Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. "What you're seeing here, slowly, is Google embracing an advertising-driven model, in which money will have a greater impact on what people have ready access to."
Google says only that it will rank the knols "appropriately" when they appear in search results. Manber says that Google does not want a "walled garden of content"; it will make knols available to other search engines.
If the copyright information on Google's screenshot is any indication, knols will be copyrighted under a Creative Commons license that allows others to copy, distribute, and alter the entry, so long as the original authorship is attributed. The license is similar to Wikipedia's license.
Salon blogger Farhad Manjoo compares the screenshot with Wikipedia's corresponding entry on insomnia. He finds that while Google's efforts are more trustworthy, Wikipedia offers "a wider field of view," one that includes folk remedies and other alternative approaches to treating the disorder.
But he points out that Wikipedia's editors can always opt to add content from knols to their own entries:
If competing knols do indeed proliferate, Wikipedia would grow to include the knowledge they contain – and, in that way, it would only get stronger. The more stuff that goes online, the bigger Wikipedia grows.
So Google isn't killing Wikipedia. It's helping it.
Wikipedians, for their part, don't seem to be losing any sleep over Google's project. In an emailed statement to the Bloomberg news service, Wikipedia wrote that it welcomed the initiative. "The more good free content," the statement said, "the better for the world."
Page: 
1 | 2
