Wikipedia encourages debate, an enormous amount, but has little interest in new contributions anymore. And since an entry can be changed just before accessing it by a user, there can be no expectation Wikipedia is reliable.

Wikipedia’s quality police are in full force, and the pages are de facto locked down by cliques of revert editors.

Sooooooooooo … Knol may have a lot of trash, but it allows complete freedom without constantly having to protect a pet article.

And Knol is really low maintenance compared to Wikipedia with its constant internecine wars about notability, quality, “verifiability”, style manual, and yet more rules that spring up everyday like crab grass.

One reason Knol has done so miserably is that Wikipedia was the first mover in this sort of field. It already had drawn the attention and efforts of so many people, trying to get those same people to duplicate their efforts was clearly too strong an inertial pull to overcome. Though I would argue that the reason Wikipedia continues to thrive and Knol failed boils down to editorial oversight.

Both were set up as wide-open, Wild West sort of ventures, where there was no governance. Volunteers filled that vacuum for Wikipedia, and there’s a deeply dedicated group of about 500 people who enforce Wikipedia’s rules with a collective iron fist. Despite the original goal of not having an editorial board, the Wikipedia community created their own de facto editorial board. This is good and bad, in that this group cuts out the garbage and keeps down the abuses, but at the same time, they’re often overzealous and prefer strict adherence to the rules over quality of content and increasing information delivered. Google’s Knol doesn’t seem to have ever formed enough community to generate a similar de facto editorial board. This combined with the fact that one could make your own Knol articles uneditable by anyone else has led to a lot of unchecked abuse, a dominance by the self-promotion noted in your posting.

Both serve as fascinating experiments, taking a starting point and seeing where things evolve, for good or for bad. Reading your posting, PLOS One immediately came to mind. It’s a collection of uneditable articles, in many ways, much more like Knol than Wikipedia. Readers are supposed to comment on and rate the articles which are published with minimal editorial oversight. We’ll have to see how that experiment works out as well.