[OWW-Discuss] Googlepedia?

[Bill F]

In the Wikipedia world, people get compensated by having their words
represent topics they want to be known for understanding or being associated
with.  Or they may want to be more involved in a community that permits them
to edit the words of others or provide/limit access to those topics. Money
or external reputation, to date, have not been relevant. The recent
illustration compensation was the first direct attempt to attract
contributors with cash awards. The real money being made in the Wikipedia
world may be to consultants paid to adjust content in articles to favor
their client's specific agendas.

Google's pushing a model in which people's content is paid for. This is a
more Wikia-like approach. Google is simply cutting out the middle-man. If
Google can charge less and provide access to more searchers than Wikia,
Google will take business from Wikia.

I don't see Wikipedia impacted greatly by this. Google clearly wants to find
ways to starve the for-profit side of the Wikimedia Foundation of revenue .
This keeps Wikimedia from developing a search engine better than the present
one. A side benefit is that Google will deprive part of Wikipedia from
referrals based upon the quality of the content. Since Google alone knows
what they consider to be the best quality content, there will be some
weighting of referrals to their own wiki site. This maximizes Google's
revenue potential on the referral since Google knows that a Wikipedia
referral will never directly be monetized but one to a Google wiki may.

We'll never know whether this is happening since Google is 100% closed when
it comes to the "how" of their page ratings system or of its history. Would
Google ever choose to weight selections in favor of Google wiki pages that
have ads on them versus those which do not? It's hard to say. I would
suspect that their system will use internal semantic infrastructure that
will allow them to more precisely choose a page based upon pure relevance
than it does now on arbitrary web pages. If this is the case, Google will
always be able to show that selection is made on a knowledge content basis,
first and foremost. Will they surface how that knowledge is mapped? From
their perspective, this would only lead to more information for unscrupulous
advertisers use in gaming the system and ripping off Google and their
customers.

If Wikimedia, both Wikia and Wikipedia,  succeeds in keeping viewers from
navigating back to Google for searching, it will mean a lot of money and
increased relevance for Wikia. Alexa ranks Wikia at 580 now. But they grew
51% in reach and over 250% in traffic in the last 3 months. Wikipedia hovers
around thr 8th highest ranked site. These are daunting figures.

Google still wants part of that growth for itself, despite the fact that
Wikia's ad referrals also directly fueling Google's profits. All paid ads on
Wikia are from Google. Google is throwing relatively cheap R&D/operation
dollars at the issue. It's good business.


On Dec 14, 2007 9:59 AM, Ricardo Vidal <rvidal at gmail.com> wrote:

> This could actually be a product of their acquisition of JotSpot<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JotSpot>- a structured wiki for small/medium sized businesses.
>
> On Dec 14, 2007 1:46 PM, Barry Canton < bcanton at mit.edu> wrote:
>
> > Google is testing a new project that sounds like an attempt to compete
> > with Wikipedia.
> >
> > http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html
> >
> > An interesting sentence - " At the discretion of the author, a knol may
> > include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the
> > author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads."
> >
> > --
> > Barry Canton
> > Endy Lab
> > Biological Engineering Division
> > Massachusetts Institute of Technology
> >
> > Tel.:(617) 401-7320 (Grand Central)
> > Email1: bcanton at mit.edu
> > Email2: bcanton at gmail.com
> >
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> >
>
>
> --
> Ricardo Vidal
> e: rvidal at gmail.com
> w: http://my.biotechlife.net
> skype: icky_bu
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