Wikipedia and Knol are different and don’t warrant comparisons: Jimmy Wales

Jimmy ‘Jimbo’ Wales of Wikipedia has said that Google’s Knol, which several media organisations had reported as a direct threat to the online free encyclopedia, was different conceptually. He added that Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, also saw no similarities between the two and hence the question of competition did not arise.

Wales, who was in Chennai on Saturday for a brief stop-over en route to Coimbatore, met up with a group of Internet aficionados over dinner. It was quite an opportunity to catch him in a relaxed frame of mind.

Google-killer?

Much of the dinner table discussions focussed on the Microsoft bid for Yahoo. But most of it got lost in the Carnatic music that was playing for the guests.

When we ‘tuned’ in, the conversation had moved over to how Wikia Search was doing.
“Good,” according to Jimmy. He pointed out that thousands of volunteers had enrolled the very first week. But we probe him a bit more about all the flak that the ‘Google-killer’ received, Jimmy quickly points out that it was just a monster that the media created. “I never called it a Google-killer. That was not the intention of starting Wikia Search.”

Wikia Search is a part of the Wikia Media, a for-profit organisation floated by Jimmy Wales. Though Jimmy said Wikia Search had several thousand volunteers queuing up, he also accepted that much of the criticism for the new search option was fair. “One thing is for sure. Things can only improve from here on.”

The Knol Question

The Knol question has to follow the Wikia query. “So is it the Wikipedia killer?” Jimmy thinks such a comparisons are odious and are akin to comparing apples with oranges. “Knol is essentially a tool where individual can post their opinions and is not collaborative like Wikipedia. There is a possibility that we might end up with several articles about poker or Viagra.”

Jimmy also adds that he met up with Larry (Page) and Sergey (Brin) - founders of Google - recently over dinner and even they agreed that Wikipedia and Knol were different things.

Rock Star!

The Wikipedia founder said he enjoyed interacting with Indian students. “When I go to give a lecture to a group of students in IIT, Kharagpur, 5,000 students turn up to hear my lecture and they have so many questions. I feel like a rock star then.”

Kiruba Shankar, one of the city’s well-known bloggers, David Appasamy, Chief Communications Officer, Sify, Venkatesh Chandrasekaran, head (R&D), Automotive Division, Satyam Computers, Chinmayi, singer and radio jockey, Sriram Iyer of Cognizant and Jessica Irani of Asian College of Journalism, were the others who shared the dinner table.

“For a person who made such a significant contribution to the Internet, Jimmy Wales was such a breath of fresh air,” Appasamy said in an email. “Simple, down to earth, yet so capable of giving you a perspective of the Internet.”

Photo Credit: R.Ravindran

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