Have any suggestions for the 3 Count? Let me know via Twitter @plagiarismtoday.

1: Wikipedia to Join Web Blackout Protesting SOPA

First off today, Wikipedia has announced that they will be joining Reddit and a slew of other sites in going “dark” on January 18th in opposition to the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and it’s sister act, Protect IP (PIPA). The 24-hour blackout will affect only the English language version of the online encyclopedia and is designed to protest the acts’ alleged censorship of the Web. However, the move comes as both acts are being rewritten to remove the controversial site blocking provisions and SOPA is currently on hold following a condemnation by the Obama administration.

2: SDT Suspends ACS:Law Founder for Two Years

Next up today, Andrew Crossley, the founder of the controversial UK law firm ACS:Law has been suspended from the practice of law for two years and ordered to pay £76,326.55 in costs at a Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT). The firm rose to prominence, and controversy, in 2009 for its bulk lawsuits against suspected pirates, where it demanded settlements from them to avoid further litigation. Crossley admitted to six of the charges before him, including acting against the best interest of his clients, but contested a seventh, that he had failed to adequately protect client data. The latter charge stemmed from a data leak from his server that resulted in defendant information being leaked on the Web. The tribunal rebutted his claims and found him guilty of that charge as well.

3: Copyright King: Why the “I Have a Dream” Speech Still Isn’t Free

Finally today, as the U.S. celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. day yesterday, many were surprised to learn that they were unable to find a free version of his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. The reason is that the speech itself, which was given 48 years ago, is still protected by copyright and will continue to be until 2038, 70 years after MLK’s death. Currently, EMI records is the company responsible for the licensing of the work though, with EMI’s recent auction, that right will, likely, soon go to another record company.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Wednesday evening at 5 PM ET for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Friday right here on Plagiarism Today.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Last week, @melebeth introduced me to CPedia, a new “encyclopedia” by the makers of Cuil, a search engine that was initially greeted with much fanfare before seemingly flaming out.

Cpedia is not an encyclopedia in the strictest sense as it is not written by human beings. Unlike traditional encyclopedias, which are written by paid experts, or Wikipedia, which is written largely by volunteers, Cpedia is written automatically from the search result pages creating an automated, and often wildly inaccurate encyclopedia-like page.

For example, I have a Cpedia, page as well as one for this site, though my personal page doesn’t actually say anything about me and the one for PT seems to discuss random people/items only tangentially related to the site.

However, the concern Melebeth approached me with was not just about the accuracy of Cpedia, but about the way it used content from other sources. According to her, the search engine was lifting text directly from third-party sites but not properly quoting or citing it.

So, I delved into Cpedia and found, unfortunately, that her fears were largely founded.

How CPedia Works

The basic idea behind CPedia is that it combs through the search results for a relevant term and tries to build out an encyclopedia entry automatically. The results, visually, are very similar to Wikipedia but the content is generally more jumbled and difficult to read.

Cpedia does attribute the content it uses, but in a very strange way. If you click or hover your mouse over the text within an article, but not the link, you will be given a sidebar that shows the text that’s been quoted and a link to the source in the sidebar. If you click the inline text link, you are instead taken to a references page that then links to the original source.

Usually, the individual copied passages are very short though, sometimes, the word count of the passage approached 100 words, especially when the source package was broken up into multiple parts.

CPedia seems to have a nearly unlimited number of topics covered, likely aided by the fact it is automatically generating results, and has many pages that Wikipedia does not, including one for me.

All in all, CPedia is fairly straightforward but that does not mean it isn’t a problem. In fact, in this case, it means quite the opposite.

Problems With Cpedia

Apart from the questionable accuracy of Cpedia, the entire operation, to me, seems highly suspect. The idea of creating new pages of content using snippets from dozens, even hundreds of other pages seems to be a very poor way to do business.

But even discarding the way the content is created, there are several issues with the attribution issue alone. Consider the following two problems:

1. Always One Step From Source Link: Whether you hover over the text or click to the references page, you are always one action away from the source link. This means users and other search engines alike are always two steps from the source site even though it would be trivial to make it one.
2. Lack of Clear Quotes: The entire entry is made up of short verbatim quotes from various sources but it is not clear where the quotes begin and end without hovering over the text. The goal is to make the entire work seem like an original creation, an actual encyclopedia entry, without much in the way of visible quotes, just traditional footnote citations.

However, the bigger problem is actually very simple. There are already many sites that build thousands and thousands of entries using snippets from various other pages. They’re called spam blogs and they use a variety of article generation and spinning technology to build new articles out of hodgepodges of existing ones.

And Cpedia is acting very much like a spam blog. Entries from CPedia are appearing in Google, which currently has about 177,000 entries indexed, and though, Cpedia’s robots.txt disallows the wiki directory, it doesn’t seem to be stopping search engines from indexing the entries.

When you factor all of this together, it becomes clear that Cpedia is acting exactly like a spam blog and less like an encyclopedia. Was the intention? Probably not. But it is how the site is functioning, pumping thousands of pages of poorly-written duplicate content into the major search engines.

If that is not the hallmark of a spam blog, I’m not sure what is.

Making it Stop

To be clear, what Cpedia is doing isn’t, most likely, illegal. Fair use would likely protect their very limited use of the content from each individual source. This is one of the reasons this technique is so common among spam blogs is that it makes them almost immune to copyright disputes as a means of closure.

In short, even though the ethics of Cpedia can be hotly debated, most likely they are on the right side of the law.

That being said, if you want your work removed from Cpedia, all you have to do is remove it from Cuil and that can be done by using robots.txt to block “twiceler”.

Also, you can block the IP range that Cuil uses for crawling, which is also listed on the link above.

It is a fairly simple change to make and one that is relatively easy to make. (Note: I have not and will not make it on PT, I keep my robots.txt open intentionally to help observe various issues, like these).

All in all, though I disagree strongly with what Cpedia is doing, they do have the right to do it. This makes fighting back trickier, but far from impossible.

Bottom Line

What Cpedia is doing, in my opinion, is unethical. They are using quotes from various sites without adequate clarity or attribution. They are pumping thousands of pages of admittedly duplicate content into other search engines and are producing and encyclopedia that, by their own admission, is wildly inaccurate.

Though copyright may not be a viable litigation route, I have to wonder how libel will work in this case as repeating libel is, generally, the same as making the libelous statement. In short, those admitted inaccuracies in Cpedia could, in theory, come back to bite the company at a later date.

Considering that search engine liability in cases of libel is still being settled around the world, Google won such a claim in the UK but republishing this information on your own site and admitting it is inaccurate seems to be opening up new avenues for liability.

Would this be a likely claim against Cuil/Cpedia? Probably not. But only because the audience for the site is so small that it seems unlikely many will care. The fact that Cuil/Cpedia has seen so little success is a big part of why webmasters haven’t noticed the spammy nature of the issue and taken up arms.

To be certain, Cpedia flew under my radar until Melebeth asked me about it. I can imagine it is doing the same for many others right now as well.

1: New Pirate Bay Will Become a Pay Site

First off today, in a move that is almost certain to rile up existing Pirate Bay users, the new owners have announced that they will converting the site into a paid service so they can pay copyright holders when their work is downloaded.

The announcement came from Wayne Rosso, who was appointed by the new owners of the site, Global Gaming Factory (GGF) to head up the operation. Rosso has experience with other P2P service, including Grokster, where he was the president of the company.

GGF agreed to purchase The Pirate Bay for approximately $7.8 last month. However, it appears that the sale is far from final as they first have to raise the money with which to make the purchase and need shareholder approval. Since shares in the company have gone down since the announcement, the latter part could be a pretty difficult step.

2: Wikipedia painting row escalates

Next up today, the dispute between Wikipedia and the National Portrait Gallery of London has been heading up. The dispute when a Wikipedia member, who has now been identified as David Coetzee uploaded over 3,000 images taken by the gallery of its works. Though the paintings themselves are in the public domain, under British law, photos and scans of them are not.

According to the gallery, the dispute centers more around Wikipedia harming their ability to sell prints and books based upon the images. That posting high-resolution versions on their site, for free, could hurt their efforts to recoup the £1 million in digitization fees they spent. They have reportedly offered medium-resolution images for Wikipedia to use.

Wikipedia, on the other hand, has accused the gallery of “empire building”, saying that the gallery is working to make claims on works now owned by the public and is looking to further their bottom line by restricting public access to works.

3: Copyright law still riles

Finally today, we have some of our first “reviews” of New Zealand’s new copyright proposal. The first one, which called for ISPs to disconnect users after two warnings, was scuttled after widespread user protest. However, the new one reworks the “three strikes” system by instead sending the alleged infringer to a tribunal where a variety of punishments can be levied, including fines and disconnections.

The reviews from the groups who lead the protest against the first draft say that the new one is an “improvement” but that there is still the danger for it to punish innocent users, especially in business and education settings.

It is unclear how the law would handle disconnections where there are multiple users involved, including many who likely do not share files, but it does seem that the new system would be in a better position to address those situations.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.

1: Round 2 in copyright fight

First off today, New Zealand is gearing up for a second round of its copyright fight over its controversial Section 92a legislation. The first round, which saw the government attempt to pass laws that would call for the disconnection of file sharers. was scuttled due in large part to protests by Internet users who felt that the punishments were disproportionate to the offense.

Recommendations for the new draft of 92a are due out later this week and there is widespread speculation as to what will be in the law. Though most don’t expect a full on repeat of the first round, either in terms of the protests or proposal, there is still talk that there may be a disconnection criteria in place and also the possibility of simply fining alleged infringers has been raised.

New Zealand’s move comes as France itself is going through round two of its “three strikes” litigation, the first round being scuttled by the country’s Constitutional Court.

2: Wikipedia might get sued by the National Portrait Gallery

Next up, in a case that highlights an interesting difference between U.S. and English law, Wikipedia, or more specifically the Wikipedia user “Dcoetzee” may be sued by the National Portrait Gallery in London. The reason, the user uploaded several photographs of now-public domain portraits to the Wikipedia site, images that were taken by the gallery itself. The gallery has since demanded removal of the images from the site, a request that Wikipedia has not obliged.

Those familiar with U.S. law will know that simply taking a picture of a public domain work does not produce a copyrighted work as there is no requisite creativity. However, that is not so in England. Combine that with the fact the images are being “published” in the UK due to their presence on the servers and you have a recipe where this user could, very likely, be sued successfully in the UK.

The problem being, of course, that if the user is in the U.S., or any country other than the UK, claiming any damages won could prove to be very difficult.

Despite this, the case does highlight the kind of nuances that make “international copyright” a figment of our collective imagination.

3: Stephen Fry on copyright

Finally today, British actor and Twitter celebrity Stephen Fry spoke his mind a little bit on copyright at the iTunes Music Festival.

Though he said that he didn’t want to be misunderstood as a “”help yourself and be a pirate’ advocate,” he did say that he didn’t approve of the litigation tactics by the movie and record industries (the former being an industry he’s a large part of), said that The Pirate Bay admins were unjustly pursued and that he had used Bittorrent himself to get access to an episode of House, which he had legitimately purchased earlier (and stars his old friend and partner Hugh Laurie).

In the end, Fry did admit that much of his income was generated by copyright protection and he did try to temper his comments some after the fact, however, the BBC article says that Fry was “preaching to the converted” with his talk and received a very warm reception at the festival.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.

Chris Anderson is the editor for Wired Magazine, a prominent tech journalist and a long-time advocate of the “free” business model. His upcoming book, enttield “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” has been the talk of many in the tech sectors as it deals with the idea of giving content away for free and then earning a living through other means.

However, even before the book has been officially released, it has become mired in controversy. Waldo Jaquith of the Virginia Quarterly Review (VGR), a literary review journal associated with the University of Virginia, noticed similarities between some passages in Anderson’s book and other sources. After putting some passages through Google, he found over a dozen instances where it appears Anderson copied content from Wikipedia as well as other sources.

These allegations were furthered by Edward Champion on his site, who compared several more passages from other books and blog posts.

This has sparked a firestorm of controversy on both Twitter and the comments section of the VGR post.

Without actually looking at the work (I haven’t seen a copy of the book) or being able to do a formal plagiarism analysis, I can’t offer too much commentary, but I do want to briefly recap what has been said and what I think it means.

Both Sides

According to Jaquith, he performed a “cursory” search of the book after he, “checked by hand several dozen suspect passages in the whole of the 274-page book.” He repeatedly emphasizes that this is not an exhaustive search of the work as he did not have an electronic copy at his disposal.

Jaquith listed eight different examples where at least some text duplicated verbatim. The lengthiest case involved pages 41-42 in Anderson’s book, which appears to copy heavily from a Wikipedia entry about the origin of the expression “Free Lunch”. Both of the works cite an article in the New York Times about “Free Lunch” counters but there is copying that goes beyond that including several sentences that are copied verbatim and other passages that appear to be close paraphrases.

These accusations were furthered by Champion, who listed five more examples on his blog, each involving passages that appeared to have at least some level of copying.

In all of the cases, the amount of pure verbatim plagiarism is fairly small, however, in many cases the amount of editing and rewriting appeared to be very small, either changing a few words or removing passages for brevity.

Anderson, for his part, doesn’t deny having copied from the sources, but claims that he had intended to cite the sources involved. In a statement he released he said:

All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources…

This all came about once we collapsed the notes into the copy. I had the original sources footnoted, but once we lost the footnotes at the 11th hour, I went through the document and redid all the attributions…

He went on to say that he “missed” some of the attributions, especially some of those from Wikipedia where there was no individual author to credit, and that he plans on publishing those notes online before the book is released.

In a separate statement, Anderson’s publisher, Hyperion, said the following:

We are completely satisfied with Chris Anderson’s response. It was an unfortunate mistake, and we are working with the author to correct these errors both in the electronic edition before it posts, and in all future editions of the book.

This, however, has not stopped the war of words taking place on various social news sites and in the comments of the original post. The debate has also caught the attention of the mainstream media, including mentions in The Guardian, The Baltimore Sun and the L.A. Times.

My Thoughts

Without having the work in front of me in an electronic format and only having these very limited samples, it is very hard for me to perform a thorough analysis. Given the fact that most of the plagiarism involved at least some rewriting, I would normally encourage both a thorough electronic analysis of the entire work and a close human one on suspect parts.

However, I can’t do that right now and all I have are the passages presented and Anderson’s side of the story. There is not enough here, by itself, to draw solid conclusions from, especially in the limited time I’ve had.

Indeed, Anderson’s story may have merit. If he’s able to produce the footnotes easily, it would indicate that he was keeping them and did, likely, intended them to be in the book (why keep footnotes if you aren’t planning on publishing them?).

But what I find curious is his claim that he and/or his publisher “decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources.”

This statement strikes me as odd for many reason. First, there is a well-established citation style for Web pages. Both MLA and APA styles have one. Wikipedia also provides links to each individual edit, making the argument about having to preserve the sources a difficult one. Of course, even without that there are plenty of on-demand caching services that could have helped.

Second, I don’t fully understand why Anderson or his publisher would decide to do away with the footnotes at the last minute. It’s unclear if this was a technical issue, a design choice or something other issue. Removing footnotes from a book and rewriting the body to include inline citations “at the 11th hour” is very unorthodox in my experience and it would seem to almost be an invitation for mistakes and problems.

Finally, and perhaps most worrisome, as I read through the amount of the copying in some of the sections and passages, there is far more verbatim copying and close paraphrasing than one would usually use with a simple footnote. Typically a footnote is designed more to cite the source of information, not a direct quote and Anderson’s mention of doing a “write-through” of some of the citations seems to be a very odd way to handle the problem.

In short, the attribution has to match the use and, in at least some of these instances, it doesn’t appear to me to be the case.

It is important to remember that this is not like the Maureen Dowd case where we are talking about one quote with omitted attribution, but about at least a dozen and, by Anderson’s own admission, there was a problem with the footnotes for the whole book that, clearly was not straightened out adequately.

There is no nice way to say this, at the very least this is very sloppy editing and research and, unfortunately, it paints a very negative picture of the book. Even though it doesn’t appear Anderson intended to plagiarize, his liberal copying and rewriting of other texts combined with the lack of thoroughness in attribution is, at best, extremely sloppy research.

Unfortunately, this issue severely undermines the message of his book, parts of which it seems like I was going to agree with.

Bottom Line

In the end, it doesn’t really matter whether Anderson’s copying truly rises to the level of malicious or even lazy plagiarism. The proper thing for the publisher to do would be to not release the book until these errors can be fixed. I recognize that it would probably mean destroying thousands of printed copies, but there is a very simple and serious problem with releasing it as is.

Wikipedia, operates under a Creative Commons BY-SA license, the same license as this site. The license not only has an attribution requirement, but the legal code requires the person using the content to “keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means.”

One could very easily, and likely successfully, argue that posting the attribution on a Web site separate from the book does not complete the CC license as it is not “reasonable to the medium or means”. In short, if one is able to show that this unattributed copying goes beyond fair use, it could be a copyright liability.

Other books, including Kaavya Viswanathan’s were cancelled for less (in Anderson’s defense, Viswanathan’s book was a work of fiction, leading to a higher expectation of originality) and a person claiming to be an editor in the comments said that he has had to kill more than a few books for similar offenses.

It would be both prudent legally and much more respectful to the original creators for the book to be held back until these issues can be fixed and the book be thoroughly checked for other possible un-cited quotes.

Though looking at the evidence I have in front of me, I can not honestly tell if this was a case of malicious plagiarism, sloppy editing or a very bad mistake, but it is clear that there are issues with the citations in this book that need to be fixed and waiting to correct the electronic version or make edits to the future editions is not enough.

The bottom line is that, if we accept Anderson’s story at face value (and we have no evidence to make us doubt it), whoever made the decision to drop the footnotes at the last minute made a very serious error, one that almost invited this kind of problem. Without looking at the original citations, I can’t make any hard judgements about whether the citation was appropriate for copying, but if we assume that it was, the decision to change systems at the last minute was an unmitigated disaster.

I would love to do a thorough plagiarism analysis of the book and would gladly do so if I could be provided a suitable copy but, in lieu of that, I would encourage the publisher to perform one of their own. There are plenty of tools out there that can perform one cheaply and quickly. Doing so could save the publisher a great deal of headaches down the road.

1: Pornographic videos flood YouTube

Yesterday, YouTube was raided by members of the 4Chan message boars, who uploaded score of pornographic clips to the site, many of which were labeled as children’s videos and begin with such content before cutting to graphic content. Some of the affected videos were for music groups among kids, including the Jonas Brothers.

Why would a group of people work tirelessly to expose children to pornography? According to at least one poster it was because “YouTube keeps deleting music”. Whether this is the cause for the entire raid, remains to be seen.

Though YouTube worked quickly to remove the videos, thumbnails for many of them lingered long after the videos were pulled down and were available through a variety of searches. As of this writing, YouTube appears to have eliminated the videos for the most part and searches are working normally.

2: At RealDVD hearing, MPAA says copying DVDs never legal

It appears that Real’s claims about about fair use in the RealDVD case might have a new wrinkle. The MPAA has requested an estoppel ruling form the judge in the case that would bar Real from arguing fair use in the case. The reason? Real had argued the exact opposite about ten years ago in a similar case and won on those grounds.

The previous case dealt with Streambox VCR, a product that allowed the downloading and storing of Real’s streaming music and video, saying in part that, “The DMCA does not have a fair use exception allowing individuals to circumvent access and copy protection measures.”

Real, for their part, compared DVDs to CDs, where the copying of the data onto your hard drive (for example, iTunes) is an understood fair use and standard practice.

The judge heard closing arguments on the hearing and did not issue a ruling. That will be handed down at a later date.

3: Wikimedia Foundation to Add Creative Commons License for All Content

Finally today, The Wikimedia Foundation, which includes Wikipedia, has added the Creative Commons BY-SA license to all of their content. Under the current system, existing content will be dual-licensed and new content will be CC-BY-SA licensed only.

The CC license was chosen because of requirements of GFDL, the former license, that made reusing content in Wikipedia difficult. Those requirements included the requirement to copy the full license along with any reuse of the content, which could have hindered many uses of the work.

This change was made possible in November of 2008 when the Free Software Foundation updated the GFDL license to allow double licensing and portability. This decision has not been approved by the board of directors at Wikimedia but was supported by over 75% of all voters in a recent Wikipedia survey.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.

1: Wikipedia community vote on migration to CC BY-SA begins now

First off today, in a move that could change the future of both the free culture movement and Wikipedia, there is a vote underway regarding converting the online encyclopedia from the Free Documentation License, a license that was aimed at instructional documents, to a Creative Commons BY-SA license, its rough equivalent of the CC licenses.

Though the two licenses are founded on most of the same principles, differences in the specific requirements prevent them from being completely compatible. As such, Wikipedia is holding a vote, in which anyone with over 25 edits can participate, The Creative Commons Organization, obviously, supports this initiative.

The move is motivated by two main factors. The first that the CC licenses have become the de facto standard for copyleft licensing by authors on the Web, making full compatibility an issue, and that the Free Documentation License comes with several restrictions, including the the need to distribute the copy of the license with every use.

2: Busted for taking camera to Hannah Montana movie

Next up, a Chicago-area couple was arrested this week for attempting to record the new Hannah Montana movie, apparently as part of a larger-scale DVD piracy operation. Police arrested the couple for balancing a video camera during a showing of the movie and, after a search of their home, found 44,000 CDs and DVDs containing pirated movies.

The couple, however, denies that they were involved with any piracy scheme, saying that the DVDs belonged to the mother of the husband.

Both the husband and the wife have been charged with criminal misuse of a motion-picture facility and the husband also faces charges of unlawful use of a sound-recording device, computer fraud and online sale of stolen property.

3: Returning Product To Amazon Could Brick Your Kindle

Finally today, if you are an Amazon customer and have a Kindle, you may want to be aware that returning too many items to Amazon could result in your account being banned and, if that happens, your Kindle, which is attached to your account, may become a nice paperweight.

The problem stems from the fact that the Kindle is tied to an Amazon account, where all of the purchased books are stored. If the account is banned for returning too many physical goods, it loses access to its electronic data as well.

Though one customer who had this happen to them won on an appeal and had their account and their Kindle restored, it is unnerving to say the least that Amazon could turn the Kindle into a brick.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.

However, as a recent article on The Slate has shown, Knol has not exactly emerged into the Wikipedia-killer it was hyped up to be. The article sites rampant plagiarism, poorly-written articles and poorly-sourced facts as some of Knol’s signs of inferiority.

So, even if it is not time yet to truly call Knol a failure, we’re clearly to a point where we can start talking about what has gone wrong and what Google can do to fix it.

Unfortunately, the problems with Knol seem to be fundamental ones with the service itself and are not things that Google can fix easily. In short, if Google Knol is to become competitive with Wikipedia, or even blogs in general, it can not be the Knol we all know and despise.

Knowledge Gone Astray

The Slate article points to two critical differences between Wikipedia and Knol that seems to hinder Knol’s success.

1. Lack of Community Support: In order to edit an existing Knol, you have to get approval from the original author, this reduces community involvement and puts anonymous editors at the mercy of the “experts” that wrote the article.
2. Repetition: Since articles cannot be easily edited, people tend to upload their own articles rather than try to build off ones that exist, this leads to topics with dozens of competing articles.
3. Advertising Reward: Google allowed submitters to earn money from their content by means of advertising. This attracted people with bad intentions to the site.

Strangely, I have to agree with all of these problems. When I first wrote about the site, I noted that it was a service practically asking to be spammed and, according to my two-week follow-up, I was right.

However, none of these problems with the site really cut to the core. Google has made some tactical mistakes with Knol but it has made a much larger one in its concept that will sink it no matter what other changes they make.

The Problem is QUALITY

A three-word summary of Knol would likely read “Quantity over Quality”.

Google, as a search engine company, approached the problem of creating an encyclopedia much like you would expect. They set up the rules of Knol in such a way that it would encourage as much content as possible to be uploaded to the service.

Then, according to the theory, a combination of human ratings and search algorithms would pluck the best results, rewarding those who knew wrote the most authoritative articles.

Unfortunately, the theory is flawed beyond all recognition. Consider these problems:

• Search is Stupid: As Google’s traditional Internet search has shown, algorithms are mediocre, at best, at locating the authoritative sites. Google Knol, despite the controlled environment, does not seem to improve upon this.
• Humans Aren’t Much Better: Humans that use Knol are trying to find out information they don’t know. They are in almost no position to judge how authoritative an article is. Most humans will not check sources or verify what they read, meaning an authoritative-sounding pile of lies has a better chance of success than a more meek, factual article.
• Spammers Can Game the System: Not only can spammers easily upload articles to Google Knol, but they can game the system to vote for themselves and feign broad user support. They do this already with blogs using inbound links but the controlled environment of Knol actually makes it easier.
• Terms are More Important Than Being Number One: As with the Internet at large, you can gain more reward being number 10 for a popular keyword than being number one on a lesser-known one. Though this increases competition on popular keywords, it rewards mediocre content on popular phrases more than robust knowledge on all topics.
• The 95% Problem: The biggest problem, however, is that even if the theory worked perfectly, most of the content on Knol would be complete and utter garbage. Though the good stuff might be at the top, it doesn’t take much for users to sink into the cesspool that is below. This colors the experience, hurts the reputation of the good articles and makes people distrust Knol as a source of information.

The end result of this is not that Google has created its own Wikipedia, instead, Google has created its own miniature Internet where they set the rules.

The problem is that this new Web offers no compelling reasons for creators or visitors to access it. Creators can make more money and get more traffic running a traditional blog while visitors have the same access to quality information outside of Google’s walled garden.

The end result is that Knol has created a service that benefits no one but the spammers that abuse it. As such, Knol has virtually seals its own fate unless it can turn that around.

Fixing Knol

I would argue that, with its current mission statement, Knol can’t be fixed. The problems that plague Knol are ones that exist on the Web at large, but Knol’s close proximity to Google’s heart amplifies all of these issues and makes it easier for those that wish to abuse the service.

In order to fix Knol, Google needs to step away from this idea that Knol is meant to be the anti-Wikipedia. Though Wikipedia has its problems and certainly isn’t a reliable source, it is both more useful and more reliable than Knol.

For all that Wikipedia has done wrong, it has done a fair amount right including build a huge community, produce an incredibly large number of entries, work to enforce a quality standard and keep itself moving forward. Sure, it makes mistakes, has vandals and can be a cesspool in places, it isn’t spinning its wheels with endless repetition of the same information.

Google, to beat Wikipedia cannot throw out what it does well in a bid to oppose it. Beating something does not mean being its foil. It means doing what it does better.

Knol’s premise is simply not as good as Wikipedia’s. It is time for Google to go back to the drawing board and figure out not what it can do different, but what it needs to do the same and then what it can improve.

Conclusions

For those of us who don’t use Knol, the failure of the service is actually good news. After all, it was our content that was making up so many of the plagiarized pages on the service. Knol’s failure to gain any traction in the past two months is a positive sign indicating that, while it is certainly an ideal for spammers, it is unlikely that they will get much out of it.

This means that Google’s failure could, in the long run, work to our benefit. However, until Knol has been proved to be completely useless for the spammers, it is likely that they will continue to pound away on it.

After all, if there is even a drop of benefit to be gained, the spammers will continue to try. They don’t invest anything in their efforts, other than setting up their computers and letting them go.

At that time, these predictions were mere speculation. Though a video would quickly come online showing that the spammers could already post automatically to Knol, there was little reason to suspect a spam attack beyond the nature of the service and Google’s history in this area.

This raises the question, now that the headlines have faded, has Google Knol become a haven for spam? Though it is hard to tell how serious things are given the short time span that has passed, it seems clear that at least some of the predictions were eerily correct.

Methodology

In order to get a rough picture for how much spam existed on Google Knol and how it was affecting the rankings within the service, I decided to perform a very small study.

I searched for six keywords, three that are spammy in nature, three that are not. I then looked at the first page of the results and tried to find the highest-ranked case of duplicate content I could find. I did this using only string matching, so article synonymizers might have escaped detection.

This was just a cursory check and was designed to only locate articles that were clearly duplicate content. Also, this check was ONLY designed to catch duplicate content, not necessarily spam and, as you can see in many cases, the duplicate content was uploaded by the author.

Finally, if a search term did not produce at least one full page of results, ten items or more, I did not use it because such searches likely favored spammers.

However, despite my attempts to give Knol the benefit of the doubt, I had little trouble finding junk content.

Note: All links to Google Knol have been nofollowed just in case.

Keyword: Poker

First Questionable Result

Rank: 6
Number of Stars: 1
Comments: 0
Revisions: 2
Original Article:: British Casino
Commentary: Appears to be a manual copy/paste job taking only a relevant portion of an article about different types of poker. The content also appears on many spam blogs. In short, this appears to be the result of a spam attack on Knol, at least at this time.

Keyword: Viagra

First Questionable Result

Rank: 2
Number of Stars: 5
Comments: 0
Revisions: 2
Original Article:: Viagra Web Site
Commentary: This is a tricky one as it appears to have been passed around the Web, especially via spam blogs, for a very long time. Most of the content is from the Viagra site with changes made to eliminate formatting. Once again, this appears to be the likely result of a spam attack, probably from an article database.

Keyword: Mortgage

First Questionable Result

Rank: 2
Number of Stars: 5
Comments: 0
Revisions: 2
Original Article:: Mortgage Site?
Commentary: This one is almost impossible to tell who has the original article. However, lengthier versions of this piece have been passed around the Web for a long time by all accounts. One of the most likely candidates is a mortgage site linked above. However, this Knol appears to be a likely spam attack as well.

Keyword: Apple

First Questionable Result

Rank: 1
Number of Stars: 5
Comments: 0
Revisions: 2
Original Article:: Freebase & Wikipedia
Commentary: The first non-spam keyword is the first case of clearly duplicate content being number one. Worst of all, this content was lifted from the Wikipedia entry on Apple, which has since been changed.

Keyword: Movie

First Questionable Result

Rank: 4
Number of Stars: 5
Comments: 0
Revisions: 3
Original Article:: Company Web Site
Commentary: This isn’t a case of copyright infringement or scraping, the company itself is repurposing it’s work for Google Knol in a bid to get links to its site up. The entire article has been put up on Knol, complete with a link back to the site’s home page. Not necessarily unethical, but still somewhat against the spirit of Knol.

Keyword: Dog

First Questionable Result

Rank: 1
Number of Stars: 5
Comments: 0
Revisions: 3
Original Article:: Blog
Commentary: Another case of an author reposting their own work. Though the original blog appears to be drowning in ads, it still seems to be legitimate. Since the content could not be found anywhere else and the names match, I am forced to assume that the original author uploaded it to both places.

Results

When it was all said and done, none of the searches went more than six results without duplicate content and four of the six had duplicate material in the first two items.

This paints a very grim picture of Knol but it appears that much of the problem is not spammers, but authors seeking extra exposure for older works.

While this is clearly not a copyright violation and also not against Google’s policy on Knol, it does little to help the site. If Knol is to succeed, it needs a large volume high-quality original content.

However, at this point, Google has done a very poor job keeping duplicate content out of Knol and/or reducing its ranking. Also interesting is that the spam content and other duplications almost always have high ratings, indicating the possibility that spammers have started to game the voting system as well.

Things don’t look good for Knol. Considering it has barely been two weeks and things already look this bad, it seems likely that they are only going to get worse.

Google Hits Back

One thing I noticed as I was performing this “study” was that Google has added an element to the sidebar of every Knol entry entitled “Similar Content on the Web”.

This section provides links to other copies of the work that Google has detected on the Web along with percentages to indicate how much of the content has been duplicated.

It is unclear at this time if this section updates to point out possible cases of plagiarism for authors posting original content to Knol or if it is simply designed to indicate where the content may have come from and is a one-time check.

It is also interesting that Google’s search engine often detected many other results not found in the sidebar, including, at least a few times, the original site.

I will have more on this later.

Conclusions

The bottom line right now is that Google Knol is already a haven for spam and duplicate content. Whether it is authors republishing their work in hopes of getting a little extra Adsense revenue or spammers pushing out junk content, the junk results are high in the search and only get uglier the lower down you go.

Though Wikipedia has had its issues with spam in the past, I can not recall it ever looking quite like this.

If Google Knol is to ever have a chance to become anything other than a spam haven, it needs to hit back now and do its part to keep duplicate content out. Google clearly has the tools already, but has been timid about using them, even to adjust ranking.

Knol needs original content to thrive but if it does not start encouraging and rewarding it now, it may create a situation where the few original authors are buried under a pile of duplicate content and searchers have no motivation to look to Knol for new information as almost all of it will be available elsewhere.

Hopefully, this can be the beginning of Google taking these issues seriously and using its tools to hit spammers hard.

Related Links

Mashable on Knol Spam
Problogger on Knol
Demerzel on Begging of Knol Spam
Nate Nead on Knol Dofollow/Nofollow
Usefularts on Knol Spam

For those who are interested in this topic, I will be writing and posting a follow up on Knol sometime in the coming week. I am still following the service. If you wish, you can subscribe to the RSS feed and be notified when the article goes live, as well as get updates on other copyright and plagiarism matter.

My thanks goes out to the Guardian for thinking of me and I want to again welcome all of the new readers.