Indeed — if you don’t want not to participate in a radically collaborative project, but instead one in which you control who collaborates, it should have been obvious from the very beginning that CZ is not for you. If you actually wanted “ownership” a la “moderated collaboration” for CZ, you never wanted to use a wiki in the first place.

Knol is not significantly collaborative and never will be. If it succeeds, it will not be because it is collaborative, but in spite of the fact that it isn’t. But then, I doubt it will succeed any more than H2G2 succeeded. Personally, I wouldn’t write for either project, because I have no interest in enriching a big corporation, over which I essentially have no control whatsoever. Cf. this Wikia story.

Where Knol has problems is at the level of how the site as a whole is indexed/categorized/managed. So far, the choice of mainspace entries has been about as transparent as the election of the Pope; when I found my own first attempt, an entry on Arctic Exploration selected for such blessing, I hardly had time to gear up to delete the deluge of spam that this draining of the Augean Stables sent my way. Given how hard people would probably lobby for such space, though, perhaps secret deliberation is best for now; there are already dozens of blogs hawking Knol as a marketing tool, along with an automated program which will batch-convert almost anything on your hard drive to a “Knol.” Google may need to install some sort of Knol-spam-filters before it ever gets a critical mass of decent articles, and the current opening page with its “who needs a search engine” and entries on dreadful medical maladies is absolutely dreadful.

I have no idea whether Knol will kill other encyclopedia projects — I tend to doubt it! — but I do think that, if you read closely between the lines, you can see that the mysterious “Knol team” actually took quite a number of its cues from Citizendium.

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/ is a good blog that covers the threat of mobs that get more than their fair share of political power because of hyperempowerment.

I think that the danger is real. But I certainly don’t hope that the world turns into a anarchy (probably very bloody).

arimidex breast cancer…

I’m not saying Clay thinks his vision is dystopian. I’m saying that a world in which we have lost the taste for long discourses, fictional or non-fictional, because it reflects a “cathedral-like model” of the mind that we have rejected in favor of shorter, blog- or Twitter-length comments and collaborative work a la Wikipedia, would be a world in which we would de facto have forgotten all the Great Books. That would then lead to the dystopia. I’m not sure Clay understands or agrees that his hoped-for future has these features. Perhaps he just didn’t realize. I don’t know.

So my first reaction is, “Huh? Who’s he been reading?”

Which just means, of course, that I’ll just have to take your challenge and do a little close reading to compare & contrast the the texts you cite, and the reasons for your characterizations of them. When I’m not reading Tolstoy on BookGlutton or forming my political opinions through discussion on Newsvine, or figuring out how to avoid the dystopian vision of this response to Cory Doctorow’s take on the future of bookselling.