Preamble: wrote this article a while ago… so it is not “news” any more…
Google just launched its googlepedia to compete with wikipedia… what is googlepedia? It is just like wikipedia with several notable differences: 1st, article authors are identified; 2nd, articles cannot be modified by others; 3rd, authors may make money out of their articles….
What a stupid idea… I first thought… the sale point of wikipedia is its impartial opinions…. and impartial opinions are due to anonymous contributions of the entire community… and now… how can the googlepedia ensure impartiality? obviously the articles will be biased… right?
However, at a second thought… I totally changed my mind… what a brilliant idea…
Wikipedia has its own problems, first of all… An article may be modified by parties of interests anonymously… though some technology can detect such actions, it only solves the problem from the surface…. Also, why people contribute? people want to spread the words… that’s the only reason for people to write to wikipedia… coz it’s anonymous… there are two other causes to write… be famous… and be rich… it’s a real, practical fact… unfortunately, wikipedia cannot use either of them… also because it’s anonymous… some wiki-like websites enforce named contributions… without much success… coz they only increase author’s responsibility… but not author’s motivation…
On the other hand… googlepedia can somewhat do better… people can still spread the words… names undersigned…. have more responsibility… and potentially can be more famous… and be richer… be impartial? well…. other people can comment on the articles… maybe that can partially solve the problem…
googlepedia is actually more similar to books…. both are named, both cannot be modified by other people… and both collect loyalty (kind of)… In that sense, google actually simplifies the procedure to publish books… simplifies the work of writing a book… coz even an article can be published… though it doesn’t come with a physical paper back… who reads books these days anyway?
google starts with some less conflicting areas such as science and technology… and invites some relatively well known people to write the articles… a great start move… let’s see how it works out…
a great article.
Comment by Gazer — January 24, 2008 @ 7:52 am