Knol vs. Wikipedia (#3)

Apparently I am not the only one making comparison tests between the two (not that I thought I was). TheMarker's Captain Digital himself has done his own testing and arrived to the same conclusion as I did – Wikipedia wins, at least for now.

By the way, the two articles that are the same in both websites is not because they were written by the same person (like the author of this article assumes) but because they were actually copied from Wikipedia to Knol (just like Israel's article was copied, twice).

Does this mean it's 2-0 for Wikipedia? Well yes. These tests were different from the tests I have done, which gives an additional advantage to the Wiki.

The full article (in hebrew) can be found here: http://it.themarker.com/tmit/article/4100

Knol vs. Wikipedia (#2)

Continuing the comparison between the two, here is a small test I ran today. After seeing huge differences between Knol's reaction to 'Genesis' (which apart from the rock band, is just the first bible book... ;-) and Wikipedia's massive information regarding the subject, I wanted to see how they deal with a subject such as 'Israel'.

I chose Israel, first because it is a country (my country) and should be well known by both giants. Secondly - it is an interesting subject because of its subjectivity. One of the problems in Wikipedia is that it should be impartial. A subject such as Israel is could create many conflicts between different people with different opinions and someone must decide how the article about such a subject will turn out, objectively as possible. In Knol, there is no problem with such a subject, since the entries are credited and you can judge an entry looking at its author.

The results:

In Wikipedia, the article about Israel has a lot of information, most of it hard facts. The article was edited and modified several times (you can see the evolution in the "discussion" page).

In Knol I found not less than 4 entries named Israel, and we are talking about a website that has just became public. This, I think, is one of the drawbacks of Knol. Since it is credited and one cannot edit an entry of another, you can simply add your own entry of the same subject, making it difficult to read everything and get the "true story". How many entries named Israel do you think are going to be in a few months - I guess a lot. Secondly - at least two of the entries were exactly the same - both copied from the article in Wikipedia. Well - that was predictable. Again his is somewhat problematic - anyone can take credit of an entry he copied from somewhere else, and even gain some profit from it by adding some ads. Doesn't sound so good, does it?

Summary:

Well, in this test Wikipedia took 1st place. I don't see how duplicated entries are better than the source, and come to think of it - who guarantees that a modification in the Israel article in Wikipedia will find it's rightful place in Knol?

1:0 to Wiki, still counting.

Knol vs. Wikipedia (#1)

Google has released recently (23rd July) a competitor to Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/) called Knol (http://knol.google.com/). I think it will be interesting to follow up on the competition between the two, both aiming to "rule over knowledge of man kind".

I'll begin my comparison between them with a few dry facts. I will let you be the judges (I will write my opinion at a later post)

Is it free?

• Wikipedia is free and ad-free. There is no intent to gain financial profit from this project.



• Knol is free but not ad-free. The main incentive to write in Knol is that you might get money from your published work by adding ads.

Anonymous vs. credit

• You can write anonymously in Wikipedia. The articles themselves are anonymous/credit less.



• I am not sure you can write anonymously in knol - it does ask for your user name when you try to create a new article. The articles themselves are with credits - you can see exactly who wrote them. This is part of the idea of being able to get some profit out of this.

Editing articles

• In Wikipedia, anyone can edit an existing article, fixing any mistakes or enhancing any part.



• Knol does not let you edit work that you have not published yourself.

For now I will leave you with an interesting comparison between both knowledge bases on the word "genesis". I know it is not a fair comparison, since knol was just released, but it is still a bit amusing to see the difference: