The Internet is a silly place, and one of the silliest phenomena is a meme known as Rickrolling -- if you follow a link, expecting e.g. burrito recipes, and instead find yourself watching Rick Astley and a backflipping bartender explaining how Mr. Astley will never give you up nor desert you, you've been Rickrolled. And sometimes, you might be Rickrolled en masse -- on April 1, all YouTube "Featured Videos" were really Rick Astley, and readers of fark.com and other sites engineered a coordinated and successful bid to place Rick Astley on the sing-along schedule for the April 8th New Yorks Mets game (fans booed).
Anyway, how many Americans have been Rickrolled? According to SurveyUSA -- a highly respected polling firm well-known to political junkies -- at least 18 million.
A few days ago, as explained by Udi Manber, Google announced a new service, called Knol, which seems to have approximately the same goal as Wikipedia: to create a more or less comprehensive repository of useful knowledge. Because Google is the super-juggernaut du jour, there is a lot of speculation that Knol will be a Wikipedia killer.
I disagree (not a unique point of view). Frankly, I don't find the Knol idea all that interesting, and if it wasn't Google proposing it, I don't think anyone would have noticed. The basic difference from the Wikipedia collective-authorship approach is that articles are "owned" by a single person. Others may rate, suggest content, etc., but the owner is the sole arbiter of what the article contains.
Here's why I think Knol is uninteresting in 2007:
- No microcontributions. It's impossible to make a tiny contribution (e.g. fixing a typo). Sure, you can suggest that the typo should be fixed. But there's a lot of value in the immediate gratification: people like to see that the article is better right away due to their (tiny) efforts. In aggregate, microcontributions have lots of value in and of themselves, but they are also a good way to lead people to making macrocontributions.
- No effort at consensus. It is left to the reader to make sense of the several competing articles on a particular topic. One of the huge benefits of Wikepedia's approach is that this onerous task is more or less done for you.
- Single point of failure in article maintenance. If an author loses interest in an article, it's difficult or impossible for others to take over and continue work.
These problems are orthogonal to whether Google is able to successfully incentivize authors with money or recognition (things Wikipedia can't do).
I do agree with Manber that many people who have knowledge often don't share it because sharing is hard. But, I do not think the right way to make it easier is to introduce a new Knol-style service. Rather, I think adapting the Wikipedia approach to be friendlier is much more promising, for example by implementing a WYSIWYG editor and making policy less byzantine.
(Particularly welcome in the comments are links to interesting analyses of Knol.)
According to a recent article in Scientific American by Carol Dweck, which summarizes research in the area, praising people for talent or intelligence is counterproductive. This is contrary to widespread belief.
Such praise encourages people to adopt a "fixed mind-set" -- to believe that success is the result of innate, fixed qualities (talent or intelligence). Under this model, failure is the result of things which cannot be changed, so it is permanent and any further effort is pointless: this mind-set facilitates learned helplessness.
On the other hand, encouraging people to have a "growth mind-set" -- to believe that success is the result of qualities which can be developed and improved, leads people to have a different model of failure -- that it is temporary and can be converted to success with the application of additional effort. Such encouragement could take the form of praise for successful hard work or teaching how the brain works.
Talent doesn't lead to success: hard work, perhaps with the assistance of talent, does.
Social computing researchers have lately been investigating the use of games to produce useful work, i.e., structuring games so that they produce work as a byproduct of play. The most well-known example is the ESP Game, where two people look at the same image and try to guess matching image labels without any communication outside the game -- the useful work being the labels produced. (I should note that it's controversial whether the labels produced by the ESP Game are actually worthwhile, but that detail isn't important here.)
Here's an interesting variation: freerice.com. This is a vocabulary quiz game, complete with a numeric assessment of your "vocab level". (This blogger hovers around 41.) But it's also a way to convert dollars generated by advertising -- you're shown three ads along with each word -- into food for the needy.
I wonder if the advertisers on this site are being taken for a ride. What are the click-through rates compared to other websites?
Yesterday's xkcd comic:
I found this highly amusing, particularly in light of (a) knowing that applications I use frequently are full of SQL injection bugs and have been for years despite my complaints, and (b) as a programmer, observing how easy it is to skip input sanitization.
