Design, Creativity, and New Media » Independent Research Projects » Wikipedia, KNOL, and Encyclopedia Britannica

Project: Wikipedia, KNOL, and Encyclopedia Britannica

Study these different environments and determine their strengths and weaknesses -> a starting point is the table shown in the pdf. Consider the different viewpoints - for example for contributors, for readers, as a process, as a product.

Characterization of KNOL

Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about
those subjects. Today, we're making Knol available to everyone.
2. The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the
web. An enormous amount of information resides in people's heads: millions of people
know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge. Knol will
encourage these people to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to
everyone. -> motivation
3. The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of
authors) who put their name behind their content. It's their knol, their voice, their opinion.
We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good.
4. With Knol, we are introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call
"moderated collaboration." With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol
which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions
become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the
world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it!
5. what is the relationship of "moderated collaboration" to Model Authoritative and Model
Democratic (see suggested project for this topic)
6. Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between
readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol. At the
discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from our AdSense program. If an author
chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the
proceeds of those ad placements.
7. We are happy to announce an agreement with the New Yorker magazine which allows any
author to add one cartoon per knol from the New Yorker's extensive cartoon repository.
Cartoons are an effective (and fun) way to make your point, even on the most serious topics.
-> intellectual property rights