It can hardly have escaped your notice that Google has introduced Knol, a website that is often characterised as a challenger to Wikipedia. For more detailed information, see the Wikipedia entry about Knol, the Knol about Wikipedia, the Wikipedia entry about Wikipedia, and the Knol about Knol.
Google says knol is short for knowledge, but any Dutch-English dictionary will tell you that knol is Dutch for turnip. Dutch dictionaries include the saying " iemand knollen voor citroenen verkopen" (literally: to sell someone turnips for lemons). The Kramer’s Dutch-English dictionary I bought some thirty years ago (ISBN 90-10-03005-9) provides the translation of that expression as "gull a person, take a person in".
Anyone can write a knol, yet according to the Knol homepage, "a knol is an authoritative article about a specific topic.". Just how gullible does Google think we are? Are they trying to pass off their turnip for a lemon? Google’s claim that knols are authoritive by definition is ludicrous.
Anyone can write a knol, and anyone includes marketroids and spam masters. The marketroid have discovered Knol, and are flooding it with advertorials. Google makes money from Knol by placing adverts along the side, and if the marketroid have their way, it will be Google ads along their advertorials.
Knol is already filling up with advertorials for the usual suspects, such as male enhancement products. When knol started, there were no genealogy knols. Several bloggers called attention to that, and a marketroid decided that this was great opportunity to advertorialise his company. Sadly, the first genealogy knol is an advertorial.
Keith McCarthy, marketing manager with geni.com, decided to post an advertorial for geni.com by masquerading it as a general introductory article. Another knol user, Briana Tomkinson, was quick to post a comment titled "Overly biased towards one genealogical tool", noting that it "includes far too many plugs for Geni".
McCarthy posted another knol about GEDCOM. Both articles are posted with knol’s default Creative Commons Attribution License. That means that you can copy it and adapt it any way you see fit as long as you credit its author.
Google does not like it when duplicate content is posted in more than one place, and has actually added what amounts to a plagiarism indicator to Knol. It says "Similar Content on the Web: geni.com 99%" next to his GEDCOM knol, and the domain name in that message actually links to the Geni.com page that McCarthy copied the content from.
The GEDCOM knol appears to be a verbatim copy of the GEDCOM topic in Geni.com help wiki, except for its title. McCarthy’s advertorial also contains large parts copied from the Geni.com help wiki that he co-created. Geni.com was apparently in a hurry to make sure they could claim the first genealogy turnip.
Knol is growing, and not all of it is spam or advertorials. There are some informative knols now. For example, Richard Hillenbrand’s small knol about doing genealogy research in New York State provides a small list links to several New York State specific websites, that those out of state are less likely to know about, such as the 6 million historical New York newspapers on the free Fulton Archive.
Google discontinued Knol on 2012-05-01. All the knol links were broken and have been removed.
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.