Knol and Wikipedia

Wikipedia's Knol page
Image by dannysullivan via Flickr
Fair use claimed for commentary
By now, everyone and their brother has blogged about Knol. If you don't know what it is, you've been under a rock, apparently (not that there's anything wrong with that)... follow the link. (which naturally leads to Wikipedia)

Probably half of those blogposts have to do with the relationship between Knol and Wikipedia. Again, go find them if you want to read them.

Some people are saying it's a new gold rush. I have an AdSense account so I decided to see what if anything in the way of gold there is to be had.

I've taken some content from Wikipedia and put it on Knol. The content I took is content I myself authored... I took my DYK articles, at the point of the last edit by me prior to the first edit by someone else, so all content was mine, and Knolised them. (why that edit? Because at that point the content is solely authored by me. That means I can relicense it as I see fit, granting GFDL does not take away the right to license under other terms as well)

The actual formatting leaves a lot to be desired, since they are paste jobs, if I see any signs of traffic I'll improve them. But for the most part at least so far, they are the only Knols on those topics. All their links lead straight to Wikipedia, at least for now.

I am not going to pimp them by linking... if you want to find them you can.

I'm curious as to how this all will play out... will these get any traffic? Will I get improvement suggestions? Will Knol itself complain? Most of these show high correlation to Wikipedia which is not unexpected.

What do you think? Have any of you done this? What will the long term effect be?

Enough about the darn boat, already...

By now all (3 of) my readers must be thoroughly sick of hearing about SS Christopher Columbus and her adventures as a Featured Article Candidate. After all, I wrote about this topic not once before, but twice...

Never fear, this is the last post on that article for a while, I would think, because the article has made it to Featured Article status... Yaay!

I had thought that every comment had to be resolved, but as it turns out, she was promoted with some remaining unresolved minor comments. Still, the article never actually got an oppose, and in a great display of collaborativeness, many of the commenters pitched in and fixed their own or other people's comments.

In fact the article even made the Wikirage top 100 list by edits over a 3 day period.. check out the graph of activity.

So I guess I don't know what all the whining is about? Or did I get lucky? The Featured Article process was exacting and demanding, yes, but ultimately the article's a lot tighter now than it was when we started. (and it was a lot smoother than getting the article to Good Article status, that took two tries!) And now I am trying to decide what other articles I should think about nominating! But why aren't I on this list yet? I demand answers. (obviously an evil bot!) Oh well, a topic for another blog post. What, you thought I was done with this topic???

well well...

Hmph... maybe this FA thing isn't so bad after all. Hopefully I won't jinx things by saying that I think maybe the old girl is going to make it!

I can't really take all the credit, or even much of it, frankly. The collaborative editing on this article is nothing short of remarkable. Compare the difference (121 edits so far, and counting) before and after and see the edits by everyone using this nifty tool. (1)

So, no question for you today. Just happiness. The old girl deserves a great article. She got a raw deal, scrapped after 44 years of faithful service and nothing much saved from her.

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1 - Another great tool is the external link checker, which is a very sophisticated tool, good for spotting and fixing all sorts of problems!

Throwing myself to the wolves?

Some time ago Giano opined that any Wikipedia administrator worth listening to should have at least one Featured Article (FA ... "Wikipedia's Best Work" ) under his or her belt, if not actually produce one per year. That suggestion was not met with universal acclaim. :) But there's some merit to it, nonetheless... or at least to the notion that everyone seeking any extra permissions, should have at least some experience with actually writing the encyclopedia.

While I have written some 25+ DYKs 3 of which are Good Articles, I don't yet have a Featured Article to my credit, and I've been maneuvering to get one to the state where it might be a candidate for some time.

So, armed with a lot of help, including the sage advice given here, I've launched a Featured Article Candidacy for SS Christopher Columbus, which is of all the articles I've written, perhaps my all time favorite. There are those that deride the FA process as overly "fussy" or bureaucratic, but I am not sure that's so... so far the suggestions I've gotten have almost all been actionable and were, for the most part, things I'd missed that really did need sorting. Extra eyes do wonders at spotting things needing fixing.

We shall see how it goes. I'm hoping for smooth sailing. Wish me luck!