The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
I love Wikipedia. If there is absolutely anything I need to know about, it is usually among the first places I head to. I know all of the controversies surrounding it and I still head there. I believe it is an extremely valuable source of information and an amazing effort produced by thousands of people. The idea behind Wikipedia is as ambitious as it is simple: to bring the sum of human knowledge onto the web in a way that is freely accessible to anyone. It is estimated that over seven per cent of web surfers make at least one stop at the site every time they are online. This isn't really that hard to imagine seeing as it currently has almost 2.25 million articles, over 15 times as many as Encyclopedia Britannica. Over this past year, Wikipedia has been embroiled in a constant battle to prove its worth. People like Andrew Keen, author of the book The Cult of the Amateur, have argued that Wikipedia is the beginning of the end of knowledge. Keen argues that sites such as Wikipedia make us no longer respect experts because making all knowledge available to anyone to edit or add to, only leads to online vandalism. While it is certainly true that anyone can make any sort of change to a Wikipedia entry, research shows that the average time to correct a vandalized article on Wikipedia is less than 10 minutes. For popular or controversial pages that people are watching, the repair time is far less. Interestingly, while I was writing this article, I was watching a webpage that shows live edits being done to Wikipedia and saw someone editing the entry to moon landings, talking about them being all faked. Checking back 20 minutes later, this vandalism had already been fixed. Wikipedia has come under attack again, but this time from a far more important and dangerous enemy, Google. Google recently announced the beginning of Knol, a website that is meant to be an authoritative collection of knowledge. Google is inviting experts from all areas of the globe and from many subject areas to contribute a page, a unit of knowledge which they are calling a "knol." Regular people are going to be able to rate the helpfulness of the pages or make suggestions, but not edit the pages themselves. A very different take on who has valid knowledge to contribute for the world to read. Also very different from Wikipedia, the knol pages will carry Google ads. Those small ads may not seem very significant, but they are the main source of Google's multibillion-dollar-a-year industry. Each time you click on one of those ads, Google makes some money. Depending on the company and their relationship with Google, that amount may be a few pennies, or a few dollars. Collect all of these small transactions and they add up to billions each year. Rumours online say that Google is both frustrated and worried by the number of ad-free Wikipedia articles that are showing up high in their search engine rankings. But these millions of articles carry no ads at all, meaning that a large portion of the web is simply closed to the possibility of Google making any money from them. Whatever Google's reason, whether it be wanting to create a more authoritative source of knowledge produced by people who are recognized as experts in their field, or whether they simply want to see many more pages produced that have ads on them, it is an experiment that has the potential to change much of the landscape of the Web. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
