A comparison between three knowledge resources, Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, and KNOL may highlight interesting trends in information production and information retrieval, a transition from what Fischer terms "model-authoritative" to "model-democratic" (discussed in another project). Connected societies are moving towards models of user-generated content in many types of information production. The trajectory from Enc. Britannica to KNOL echoes similar trends in traditional news media, from mainstream media, through blogs, to emerging information production services like Twitter.

This research intersects issues of trust and other research in online social networking. Tom Erickson, an interaction designer, with diverse research interests, wrote about trust in his CSCW '06 position paper, "Trust Among Strangers." At the time, he noted a role for Jacobs' notion of "the familiar stranger" (1962). Revisiting this concept even two years after Erickson's paper can offer insight into the transition towards social-networking models, of which KNOL may be one, where the link between information and the online identity of the author ensures a certain level of trust and trust-worthiness of the information, and allows for a system to by highly self-regulating.

This project would intersect in sections with the project I worked on last semester, "Motivation and Content Creation in Online Social Networks," though I believe that some of the research questions we explored there will have different answers in the Wikipedia and KNOL environments.

Amy Bruckman and Andrea Forte are doing research on Wikipedia, delving into educational and ethical issues with Wikipedia and other wiki participation.

Bryant, S L., Forte, A. and Bruckman, A. 2005. Becoming Wikipedian: transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia. Pp. 1-10 in Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work.

Erickson, T. 2006. Trust among strangers. (Position paper for CSCW '06). Retrieved from: www.visi.com/~snowfall/index.html

Jacobs, J. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House.

I find Knols very interesting since they are a great bridge between Wikipedia and official online encyclopedias like Britannica Online. Wikipedia is very useful in that anyone can add or alter what is posted for a given topic, yet the fact that anyone can update the page may lead to false information. Encyclopedia Britannica is a great reference for important information, but the information present is not readily updated. Facts found in the encyclopedia may no longer be true if, for example, a new discovery occurred before the release of a new edition.

A KNOL is the best of both worlds, as a credible source has created the information, but anyone who may have additional knowledge can inform the author easily. The author can then investigate the knowledge chose whether or not he/she feels the information is valid and worthy of being posted on the page.

I have not done much relevant to this topic except for using both Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica Online for research in other classes. Although Wikipedia sources are not the most reliable, there are often reliable sources listed at the bottom of the Wiki page that can be of use.

Britannica recently announced (1/24/2009) that they will take a more collaborative, but not democratic, approach to maintaining online content. This approach combines several of the attributes of both Knol and Wikipedia to form a modernized approach to the expert-reviewed model of content creation. This provides a very interesting time to research the differences between not only the three encyclopedias, but also to compare the older and newer versions of the Encyclopedia Britannica itself as it grows and evolves its new model.

This project is inherently difficult, however, in that it is hard to define and determine the objective strengths and weaknesses of the various encyclopedias. More importantly, the lack of growth with Knol and the shear youthfulness of the online platforms makes them difficult to assess for long-term sustainability and impact. For instance, it is hard to predict how much historical content in Wikipedia articles will change over decades rather than years. It is impossible to predict whether articles will become stagnant or continue to undergo change as popular opinion changes.

I have worked on web systems that provided authoritative content to end users in trusted environments. It would be interesting to compare how trust is formed with user-generated content and especially the influence of anonymity with content authors.

BBC Article describing Britannica changes:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7846986.stm

This topic is an interesting one because of the fact that it ultimatly leads to the question of, Which way is a better environment for the spread of knowledge? personally i think that with a well monitored pages that wikipedia will ultimatly be the best, not only does it incorporate facts from experts but because of it's wider base of authors, it can be spread to more topics…

I liked the Model-Authoritative Model-Democratic project, and the KNOL seems to combine some of the best aspects of Model-Democratic (online) and Model-Authoratative (official document). If KNOL's are easily accesible, and incoorperated into popular search engines they could be a great way to get accurate and fresh information from around the world

Wikipedia, and Encyclopedic sources like it strike me as an incredibly interesting part of our current culture. Obviously more availability to information is a large part of the purpose of the internet, and now that the internet exists the question of success lies on the shoulders of those providing it. Which means that the real dilemma lies in how accurate the information is, and how much of it there is. The answer to how much has always been a fairly finite amount, the contents of volumes of information compiled by the compilers of information i.e. Encyclopedia Brittanica. But with the invention of inter collaboration over the internet volumes of information can now be compiled dynamically by a group of users. But with this new group of users becoming contributors there is now a more pressing question of reliability. I think this simple conflict of more content at the cost of accuracy is at the heart of Wikipedia, KNOL, and Brittanica's online content. Like all new technologies I think with time we must discover the bust comprimise between these two sides of the conflict. Obviously the wealth of content added by dynamic contributors is too great to be overlooked. I have certainly seen things reported as fact on wikipedia that I know to be incorrect beyond the shadow of a doubt, and surely we all have. On the other hand I rarely can come up with something I'd like to know more about without finding at least some information on wikipedia. Personally it is my intuition that wikipedia is far too lax a system, I think it is clear that there must be a tiered system of ability to edit content. And above all I think these systems still need a significant body of people to constantly monitor and authorize/remove changes being made by the dynamic populace.