Knol is that Google Wikipedia spinoff that I had foreseen about a day before it went public.

Because the site is designed essentially as a “Wikipedia with attribution”, what is going to end up happening in all likelihood is that the people who are credited with the page’s content will actually end up writing fairly little of it. It will fall to others – those working for the expert, if not the general public – to maintain these pages. If Knol becomes sufficiently popular, maintaining a Knol page will become a sort of resume-worthy badge of honor. Because this will help people’s careers, it will become another sort of paper-mill.

Of course, this is precisely the sort of result I’d expect, given the homogeneity I thought existed in Google when I visited. What we’re seeing here is likely the product of a bunch of academics attempting to apply existing concepts in scientific publishing to an online encyclopedia, probably in their 20% time. Unfortunately, as I’ve repetitively stressed, there are many significant problems in the way scientific publishing is conducted, not the least that attribution and work put into the project are often unlinked.

It’s a good idea in theory, but an awful one in practice, not to mention that fragmenting the world’s knowledge is not a good thing. Better to concentrate the efforts of an encyclopedia in one place.