a convenient truth

Encouraging people to contribute knowledge, a post on the official google blog seems to be trumpeting the arrival of a Google competitor to Wikipaedia.   It works in a rather different way though - instead of a single authoritative article on a subject, each article will have a single author and there can be multiple articles on the same subject.

This means there is no need for direct editorial control - Google’s contribution extends only to which articles are offered in response to which searches.  On this subject Udi Manber has no fear that this presents too much of a challenge:

Once testing is completed, participation in knols will be completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be of high quality. Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge.

Of course Google’s commercial motivation is never far away:

At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

It remains to be seen how well this works of course.  Wikipedia’s famed Neutral Point of View is an unattainable goal in reality, however the attempt to achieve it has a lot of value and the compromises some otherwise irreconcilable communities have achieved on Wikipedia is impressive.

I look forward to seeing how Google deal with the inevitable edit and comment war that will accompany contentious subjects, particularly the rather random set of subjects that comprise the US Culture Wars: Abortion, the Iraq War, the United Nations, Gun Control and the rest.

If they can deal with these without human intervention then maybe Google really can bring world peace