Knol: Wikipedia, but not as we know it...

A while ago I posted a blog about how Wikipedia in Germany was experimenting with new editing rules in attempt to stem the rising number of malicious edits. In essence, these new editing rules would impose greater editorial controls by only allowing trustworthy and hardened Wikipedians to affect changes. The success of this policy remains unknown (perhaps I’ll investigate it further after posting this blog); but the general ethos was about improving information quality, authority and reliability.

While Wikipedia wrestle with their editorial demons, Google have officially launched Knol. According to the website, a knol is a "unit of knowledge", or more specifically, "an authoritative article about a specific topic". Each topic has an author who has exclusive ownership of the topic which is associated with them. An author can allow visitors to comment on knols, or suggest changes; however, unlike Wikipedia, the author cannot be challenged. This is what Google refers to as "moderated collaboration".

Says Google:

"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!"

A knol is supposed to be an authoritative and credible article, and Google have therefore placed a strong emphasis on author credentials. This is apparent from the moment you visit Knol. Medical knols are written by bona fide doctors; DIY advice is provided by a genuine handyman – and their identities are verified.

Knol is clearly a direct challenge to the supremacy of Wikipedia; yet it jettisons many of the aspects that made Wikipedia popular in the first place. And it does this to maintain information integrity. Am I sorry about this? 'Yes' and 'no'. For me Knol represents a useful halfway house; a balance between networked collaboration and information integrity. Is this elitist? No - it's just common sense.

What do you think? Register your vote on the poll!

Making the inaccessible accessible (from an information retrieval perspective)

Websites using Adobe Flash have attracted a lot of criticism over the years, and understandably so. Flash websites break all the rules that make (X)HTML great. They (generally) exemplify poor usability and remain woefully inaccessible to visually impaired users, or those with low bandwidth. Browser support also remains a big problem. However, even those web designers unwilling to relinquish Flash for the aforementioned reasons have done so because Flash has remained inaccessible to all the major search engines, thereby causing serious problems if making your website discoverable is a key concern. Even my brother - historically a huge Flash aficionado - a few years ago conceded that Flash on the web was a bad thing – primarily because of the issues it raises for search engine indexing.

Still, if you look hard enough, you will find many that insist on using it. And these chaps will be pleased to learn that the Official Google Blog has announced that Google have been developing an algorithm for crawling textual Flash content (e.g. menus, buttons and banners, “self-contained Flash websites”, etc.). Improved visibility of Flash content is henceforth order of the day.

But to my mind this is both good news and bad news (well, mainly bad news...). Aside from being championed by a particular breed of web designer, Flash has fallen out of favour with webbies precisely because of the indexing problems associated with it. This, in turn, has promoted an increase in good web design practice, such as compliance with open standards, accessibility and usability. Search engine visibility was, in essence, a big stick with which to whip the Flashers into shape (the carrot of improved website accessibility wasn’t big enough!). Now that the indexing problems have been (partly) resolved, the much celebrated decline in Flash might soon end; we may even see a resurgence of irritating animation and totally unusable navigation systems. I have little desire to visit such websites, even if they are now discoverable.