Knol — Google’s new Wikipedia for experts — is a spectacular engineering feat. Not many companies could set up an effortless cell-phone integrating ID verification system. (See yesterday’s post.)

But Google’s engineers always mess up the social side, and they did it again this time.

Here are 5 things they need to fix.

1. The Articles on the Front Page.

A front page isn’t just a sidenoted showcase window — it should be like a business card, conveying a focused impression of what the site is. It should excite people and make the site seem like a fun place to hang out.

Knol wants to attract experts that feel uncared for on Wikipedia — so the front page showcases articles by doctors.

This is what Google wanted people to see:

And this is what people actually saw:

If you think the top part is bad, scroll through the whole picture. The really amazing thing is how many articles are both depressing and gross.

This is bad because…

Because reading the front page makes you want to kill yourself. (And ironically, there is no “suicide prevention” article. Unironically?)

What were they thinking?

Well, they were focused on being engineering geniuses. Knol is built from a thousand intricately interlocking components — layers and layers of javascript frameworks, an interface to the database, sophisticated authentication tying the site into people’s google accounts, meticulously constructed algorithms to fillet the content for indexing.

And plus, Googlers are used to viewing front pages as unimportant fluff — they built a search engine dedicated to retrieving the best deep-buried content and laying it out nicely on a results page, sidebars and formatting be damned.

But front pages are super important.

To be fair, Google might also be trying to spread knol via word-of-mouth among physicians. But there has to be a way to do that without a front page of death.

How Wikipedia Does it

As with Knol, Wikipedia’s front page is pulled in from other pages (from “templates”, technically).

But unlike the Engineers who chose the featured knol articles, the people who edit those templates take their duty seriously. They’ve been immersed in wikipedia for years, and that spark of whoa is second nature. They’re basically coolhunters, staffing the most popular cool-stuff blog in the world, working for the admiration of their fellow otaku.

Deputy dog would kill to hire them away. Knol should be desperate to attract them. But they aren’t much interested in reading about autism and genital warts.

How Knol should do it

By injecting a human touch. Stop treating the front page of Knol like the front page of Google — as a pristine space to be populated by checking form boxes — and start putting messages from the team there. If you’re looking for physicians, say you’re looking for physicians.

2. Information Architecture of the Front Page

Sorry to harp on this, but looking at a front page should be like going into a coffeeshop — you should be able to look around, figure out what the crowd is like at a glance, see unwashed hippies with dreadlocks in the back or some college students on their laptops in the front corner.

The last thing you want to see is a bunch of empty seats. Then you’re not staring through a window into the world; you’re just sitting by yourself looking at a computer monitor.

So giving the impression of activity is vital for a community site, especially when the site is small. You want to show exactly what’s happening right now, who’s online, etc.

When wikipedia was younger, its most important place was Recent Changes, where you could see all the edits that just happened. Only vandal-fighters use the page now (some wikitourists, too), but it’s still in the left-hand sidebar of every wikipedia article.

Having a Recent Changes page makes it more fun to contribute, because you can be sure someone will see what you wrote. Everything2 has it, blogger has it, reddit has it, digg has it, livejournal used to have it. Even dating sites let you browse by “online now” and “recently updated”.

It’s one of the most important doorways into the site.

So where’s the Knol equivalent?

I looked long and hard (and let me tell you, I’m good at surfing the net). It’s not there.

At one point I hit upon a link in — seriously — 8 point text at the very bottom of the page that said “browse” (it only shows up if you’re logged in). But it went to a long, unformatted list of more “featured” articles (beginning with the ones I’d already seen).

What were they thinking?

“We have to fight spammers.” Google spends a lot of time and money fighting search-engine gaming, and they’re good at it.

The way they see it, a recent list would be a huge incentive for shady self-promotion, link-farming, blah blah blah.

How Wikipedia does it

The same way the french revolution did it: by making its participants feel like they’re full owners of something amazing, and god damn it, if we have to break a few filthy spammer necks we will.

Wikipeida users have the tools to oust spammers themselves. Knol users don’t.

How Apple does it

Leopard Wiki does Wikipedia one better, and actually displays a list of individual recent changes right in the global sidebar.

How Knol should do it

Knol lets users rate articles, so I was sure I’d see a list of the top ones somewhere — and low-rated articles could be kicked out. This is probably in development.

3. There Aren’t Any Interior Links

That is, there are no links from one Knol article to another.

This is bad because…

Because interior links tie the site together — they make it a single entity, not a bunch of disparate articles.

Linking articles together is fun — it feels like you’re building something important. And it means all the good articles get read, as people follow links from other articles.

What were they thinking?

“You can make a regular link to any site on the web, including other Knol articles! Why would you need anything else?”

This is misguided for two reasons. First, you’re not able to link to yet-unwritten articles — more on that in a second. Second, baking in a specialized link tool creates a social convention that encourages inter-linking and makes social interaction more interesting.

How Wikipedia does it

On Wikipedia, you can link to any article by surrounding its title with square brackets, [[like this]].

Because you can make a link out of any phrase, it’s possible to link to articles that don’t even exist yet. (These links show up in red.)

Redlinking was one of the most important ingredients in Wikipedia’s early growth; it showed readers of one article possible writing opportunities in another. It allowed editors to make their to-do lists and their articles the same thing.

How Everything2 does it

Like Knol, Everything2 is a bucket of articles with a rating system and individual authorship. But on Everything2, any user can add links to any article (”softlinks”).

And, as on Wikipedia, authors can link to written or unwritten articles (”nodes”, in e2-speak. Sounds a lot like “knol”, yes?).

How Knol Should do it

I like the double-square brackets, personally. I know this breaks with the use-buttons-for-everything Knol formatting convention, but it’s worth it.

4. The Search Function Doesn’t Work

This is a really strange one. If you type in a word that doesn’t exist in an article title, the article doesn’t come up.

How Wikipedia does it

Exactly the same way! Just kidding. Wikipedia’s search utility has gotten a lot better, though it’s still no match for a site-specific Google search of the Wikipedia domain. (And an army of Wikipedians go around manually creating “redirects” from one name to another.)

What were they thinking?

Hell if I know. They should at least have provided a general google-search in addition to their strict title-search.

5. The Whole Thing’s Half-baked!

This is a summary.

There are no opportunities for cross-pollination between articles. There is no way to sort articles by most-viewed, or by rating. There is no way to see a list of users. There is no way to search properly.

Basically, Knol seems unfinished. Until Google fixes these problems — and it should be pretty easy, honestly — Knol is not going to take off.

What were they thinking?

They were thinking, look at all these search results that Wikipedia is at the top of. We could be running ads on these!

Silly Google. If it were easy to make a Wikipedia, everyone would have done it. (You can read this part as either Bugs Bunny or Marylyn Monroe.)

Seriously, I think they’re probably taking things touch-and-go. But at least in the short term, Knol articles won’t rise to the top of the results unless Google gives them special treatment in the algorithm.

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See also: Nobody pwns Wikipedia.

For some mistakes Wikipedia is making, see Nuking the Fridge and deletionism by the numbers.

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Posted Wed, 23 Jul 2008 23:46:16 and filed under business, gadgets. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.