It’s the beginning of the end for Wikipedia. There can be only one (top ranked web encyclopedia)… and it’s almost certainly going to be Google. I use Google all the time – it’s practically indispensable for a number of things aside from web searches. But this article caught my eye:
Knols Project: Google Experimenting With User Generated Encyclopedic Pages
The official Google blog has a post tonight about a new project that’s in closed, private beta. The program is called Knols, or “units of knowledge.” Knols participants will write reference pages on any topic, using a Google content creation tool apparently in the works, and those pages will be highlighted in Google search results.
What’ll be interesting is whether they can do a better job of keeping controversial issues more politically neutral. Wikipedia fights that battle on a continual basis and often loses. This is Google we’re talking about. Senior Advisor Al Gore’s Google. Kowtowing to China Google. Associated with MoveOn.org… letting Islamic supremacists into the News section while blocking conservatives. (Something that has been at least partially corrected.) Noel Sheppard wrote, at the time of that last scandal,
[I]f the political leanings and proclivities of the world’s largest online information engine – as well as likely the number one disseminator of “new media” content – begin impacting its policies, America may be on the precipice of an even ghastlier problem than journalists, editors, and news producers allowing their political dogma to interfere with the impartiality of their reports.
I guess the question is, when they say “Do no evil,” how does Google define evil? Given Google’s current grip on the information stream and the prospect of a major new expansion of that grip, that would be good information to have.
