On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 10:51 AM, Gwern Branwen <[email protected]> wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA512 > > On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Anthony wrote: >> On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 10:30 AM, Gwern Branwen wrote: >>> >>> As will surprise none of the Knol nay-sayers here (in which number I >>> believe I can count myself), Knol hasn't done too great. >> >> Compared to what? I can't imagine Knol is much worse than Wikipedia when it >> was 6 months old. Knol just published its 100,000th article. When >> Wikipedia was 5 months old, it said on the main page "We've got over 6,000 >> pages already. We want to make over 100,000." The Wayback machine then >> skips ahead 5 more months, by which point Wikipedia brags "We started in >> January 2001 and already have over 13,000 articles. We want to make over >> 100,000, so let's get to work" >> >> To be sure, Knol has a lot of very serious problems with it. But it's only >> 6 months old. The concept is far from finalized. 6 months into Jimmy >> Wales' encyclopedia dream he was still working on Nupedia.
A thread on Haskell-cafe asked whether Knol was a good place for documentation, which reminded me of Knol's continued existence. Like I did previously, I went looking and the performance of Knol in the years since has been quite bad: http://www.gwern.net/Wikipedia%20and%20Knol#knol-did-fail At this point, I'm comfortable asserting Knol is a failure, and have moved on to trying to guess when it will die, exactly: http://www.gwern.net/Wikipedia%20and%20Knol#knol-death-watch -- gwern http://www.gwern.net _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
