Wikiality

Oh Lord.

Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing....

The goal is... to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content.

Notwithstanding some of the shittier things they've done, I'm actually a pretty big Google fan. But is this really something that will make the online commons a better place? The idea behind Wikipedia is profound and elegant and it makes the site extremely powerful. But that idea is also the source of its biggest flaw: that for controversial, or poorly understood, or deeply abstruse issues, there's a huge risk of error finding its way into the system. That's not a terrible problem, and, in principle, it will probably decline asymptotically as more people become engaged and make Wikipedia a greater source of "reality" and less a source of "wikiality".

Adding an enormous competitor into the mix, though, not only has the potential to slow that refinement process down, but also to confuse the extremely large number of people who will turn to either site for information by adding extra, unique error. Reality will now be at odds with dueling wikialities, and, frankly that terrifies my Friday brain. Maybe Google should make like Microsoft, and, well, Google, and just buy a healthy chunk of Wikipedia.

Via Henry Farrell.