Spam, plagiarism, and low quality content in Knol


User involvement in improving Knol content

Knol authors and users play an important role in cultivating and improving Knol as an online community.

If you see content which is not good, please let us know through some of the means described below.

If you have ideas on how we can improve, add your ideas under the Call for User Participation section on the bottom of this page.

We will occasionally update this page when we have user-visible changes affecting how we solicit or respond to feedback on knol quality.

Inappropriate Content

If a page is in violation of our Terms of Service or Content Policy, please use the "flag inappropriate content" mechanism in order to inform us. Flagged content will be reviewed and taken down.

Duplicate content found elsewhere on the web is not necessarily in violation of our terms of service. However, if non-unique content which is principally commercial in its intent or effect can be considered "spam" and be flagged.

We are working on additional automated processes to accelerate taking down content and accounts which are in violation of the Terms of Service.

Duplicate Content

If you are the owner of the original content, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provides certain specific procedures to follow to complain of rights infringement. As a host of online content, we follow applicable laws. The details are provided here: http://www.google.com/dmca_knol.html

If you are not the owner of the original content, and you believe that its inappropriate or low-quality reuse, you can indicate that it is poor in several ways described next.

Low Quality Content

These are your ways of indicating to us and to the user community whether you think it is good content or not:
  • Give it a low star rating.
  • Express your dissatisfaction using a Review Scorecard -- described below
  • Leave a comment describing what is wrong with the page, and why.

Our responsibility is to return content readers find useful highly ranked in search results. If you believe we are doing a poor job ranking search results, you can provide feedback on specific queries and results (which you think either should or shouldn't have appeared) using the Knol Search Bugs page.

Naturally, not all ratings or feedback are considered equal. We may pay more attention to users who have shown reliable judgment in the past, discount feedback from contributors who have a history of spurious ratings, and ignore it entirely if it appears misleading or manipulative.

The Review Scorecard

When you write a review, we ask a series questions, to help appraise the quality of a knol. See our page on Knol Reviews for more details.

An article which achieves favorable reviews from many reputable readers should be approaching the "ideal" we are aiming for:

A knol is an authoritative, comprehensive article about a specific topic.

To the extent that a page receives negative reviews from reputable readers -- it can be deemed to be missing that mark.

Unwanted comments, reviews, links, etc.

If you find your knols are being subjected to unwanted comments, reviews, or other intrusions -- you can adjust your settings to prevent unwanted forms of user interactions. See the instructions here.

Call for User Participation

As users of knol, what would you like us to do to empower a community of users to improve our content?

How can we improve the processes and mechanisms we have? What can we do to encourage growth of high-quality content and discourage the creation of information our readers don't find useful. What do you think?

User submitted ideas

Please post your ideas here. Ideas may be moderated for clarity or uniqueness.

  • Gaby wrote: Prevent gaming the system. Knols, comments and feedback complaining about other users all have a motivation behind them. Of course feedback purely intended to improve knol absolutely exists but most complaints are of secondary nature. Calling people crank, fringe, quack, delusional  or even frauds should never qualify as evidence against a person or group of people. Specially accusation of fraud without evidence is a fraudulent act in it self. Naked accusations without links and detailed description imply predatory behavior purely intended to ventilate some agenda. Most Knols are a work in progress, generalized insult never provides a remedy, it only shows the author to be unwilling to help improve the content he claims to have issues with. In stead of erecting the Arbitrary tribunal of Knol censors to provide severe academic rigor we can help people improve unnamed articles. I suggest a highlight tool with an memo to point out suggestions or erroneous statements. This can be done quickly before emotions take over.
    • MM: several interesting comment were made. Some responses:
      • An accusation of fraud is certainly not proof of fraud. The Knol Content Policy disallows specific kinds of content, including anything that appear to be "spamming" or "gaming" search results. But beyond enforcing basic terms, the policy is to allow an author's claims and other user's responses to coexist side by side.
      • Being able to better highlight & provide feedback on content could be well worthwhile and has been requested by several users now. Such feedback indeed can be more helpful than blunt criticism. Thanks.

  • Create an independent project with selected users. Only invited and reliable users would be allowed to be an author there. Also stimulate the creation of mini-encyclopedias where users with the same interests may work together and control the quality of their work.

  • PB. wrote: Your content policy states that "We don’t allow pages that have the primary purpose of redirecting visitors, acting as a bridge page, or driving traffic to another website." However, one major selling feature of the knol project is the ability of authors to combine the sharing of knowledge and expertise with the opportunity for some commercial gain. For most quality contributors this would mean links to another site (store) where supplementary and ancillary products to the knol could be sold. With this in mind, I think it would be beneficial for the community to be more specific with acceptable content policy in terms of 'maximum number of links allowed per knol or per 1,000 words'. My suggestion would be 3 per knol or 1 per 1,000 words.

    Knol Help's reply: We cannot give any simplistic rule such as "don't use more than 1 link per 1000 words". We would like users to create pages which are informative in their own right, and not merely terse infomercials that exist solely to direct traffic to commercial sites. We try to capture the gist of what a good knol should be in the ten review questions listed earlier. A document should try to achieve at least a few "Yes" answers out of the ten. Content which we flag and take down is generally insufficiently unique, highly commercial in nature, and gets a clear "No" to all or almost all ten review questions.

  • Explicitly identify lists of knols that need reviews. Ask establish authors to review newcomers.

  • Allow anonymous reviews.
  • Implement hierarchical categories. Responsible authors will see other articles that fall into the same neighborhood as their good knols, and can help critique their "neighborhood" and patrol it to flag obvious spam or abuse.

User-created pages related to plagiarism

  • Some users have created a page for reporting and organizing the author-community to react to plagiarism: see Plagiarism on Knol: Report it here. Please note that this is not Google-sanctioned, and the Knol team takes no action based on material reported there.
  • Plagiarism on Knol , by Jay Pilger.

Other Feedback Pages

This page is only to discuss increasing the quality of pages within Knol. Visit the Knol Help page to explore our feature set and make feature requests or bug reports.

Comments

Copying from Wikipedia to Knol

In all Wikipedia-Projects begins now the conversion to the new licence cc-by-sa. After this conversion in the next days have Wikipedia-articles the same licence as the most Knol-articles. Question: is it then possible to copy and paste Wikipedia-articles into Knol, to make money with adsense?

In the past it wasn't possible to copy Wikipedia-articles without permission of the Wikipedia-authors of the articles, because the licence was GFDL.

But in the next days is the licence of Wikipedia-articles cc-by-sa. Normally you can copy articles with a cc-by-sa-licence. You only have to say, who the author is, you have to make a link to the origninal-article and you have to licence it under cc-by-sa.

Last edited Jul 3, 2009 5:56 AM
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Copying from Knol to Knol!

I have written an article about Evolution and Intelligent Design a long time ago. You can find that Knol at http://knol.google.com/k/spiros-kakos/evolution-and-intelligent-design-the/2jszrulazj6wq/3#. However I just noticed that two people in Knol have copied the article as it is and posted it again under their own name! These copy-knols can be found at http://knol.google.com/k/sai-praneeth/evolution-and-intelligent-design-the/397vpp4zz6bzj/2# and at http://knol.google.com/k/anonymous/evolution-and-intelligent-design-the/wahdvup5cvdy/4?domain=knol.google.com&locale=en#. Besides copying from other sites, have some people now started copying from Knol to Knol ?!?!? What should I do?

Last edited Jun 11, 2009 7:01 PM
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An idea to promote quality content

There is important that authors priorize quality over quantity in his knols, but this priority does not implicate censure from google of the knoller’s community.
Here is a suggestion to promote quality content without censure:

Each autor that begins to write knols has a inicial space in MB or GB.
This space is the same for all authors.
The autor write his knols.
The community qualifies the knols: if they have good quality the author receives more space to write; if they have poor quality, plagiarism or “same content in the web” from sites as Wikipedia the space is the same or decreases.
Also, the calification from more qualified authors can have more value that the calification from others, similarly that the web pages in PageRank.
The authors that write to a specialized target, as themes in medicine or biology for example, will have this calification from qualified authors.
These are ideas to begin to think how to improve quality content over quantity in Knol and descourage the low quality content and plagiarism without to censure content.
One year after Knol’s begin there is an important and growing community that can collaborate and help in developing Knol as a high quality platform of knowledge.

Alberto Auné

Last edited Jun 5, 2009 4:23 PM
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Repeating a comment

I am repeating a comment. This is from Andreas Kemper

Why didn't Google stop racist content?
Dr. Dr. Volkmar Weiss is publishing racist content in the germanspeaking Google-Knol. Weiss is blocked in the germanspeaking Wikipedia. I discovered that he manipulates discussions in Wikipedia and so he was blocked. First for four month and then forever. Now he is publishing his "Science Fiction" about a society where the Nazis won the WW2 in Google Knol. http://knol.google.com/k/volkmar-weiss/berlin-nach-dem-trkenaufstand/19iebpu8jegcn/15# In 2005 Turkish newspaper like the Hürriyet were not amused to hear that turkish people in Germany have an IQ of 86. And I don't beliefe that students from Eygypt or Saudi Aribia agree with Weiss opinion, that Egypts and Saudi Arabians have in average an IQ of 83. Now Dr. Weiss made contact with the "Institut für Soziologie" where I write my dissertation, he said I can't be a doctor, because my IQ is 110-115. He is publishing in Google Knol this and a lot of more insults against me, called me "Lumpenproletariat". This is his revenge. But why don't Google stop those rubbish? The Knol-Policy don't allow racism and don't allow insults.
I have flagged those knols but nothing happens until now.
Google-Knol - the Wikipedia trash can???

Last edited May 26, 2009 9:30 AM
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Content Violations Knol now Published

We're on the air: http://knol.google.com/k/murry-shohat/content-violations-on-knol-report-them/2srzofgvr8kjr/23

Update 25 May 2009: Our Case in Point listened and corrected her Knol, removing the violations. She's no longer the case in point. This Knol works!

Update 1 June 2009: Our Case in Point requested suggestions and followed them. The Knol is much improved and we're looking for a new Case to tackle.

Update 4 June 2009: Our new Case in Point has removed 39 Knols that, arguably, were advertisements. Our team is 3 for 3 on content violation takedowns. Looking for a new case again.

Last edited Jun 5, 2009 4:22 PM
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Protecting your content on knols

Can you describe which detection tools are available in the knol platform to protect copyright data from commercial abuse, plagiarism, content and theft.

Do you have a variety of plug ins at knol platform to protect content like content theft detection, anti-scraping digital fingerprint, shortkeys and Google alert to automate detection of fingerprints, copying, plagiarism or commercial exploitation of knol data.

How to insert unique phrases in the static content of the knol to receive Google alerts when these are copied.

I think additional means/tools will help us improve the two knols Murry has mentioned in his posting and protect authors.


Last edited May 18, 2009 2:47 PM
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Two new Knols advance campaign against plagiarism

We are pleased to note the publication of two new Knols on this important topic:

Plagiarism on Knol? Report it Here!: http://knol.google.com/k/peter-baskerville/plagiarism-on-knol-report-it-here/14j3i4hyjvi88/51
The Curious (copyright infringement) Case of Randy K: http://knol.google.com/k/murry-shohat/the-curious-copyright-infringement-case/2srzofgvr8kjr/16

Apr 29, 2009 5:59 PM
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Author association

Encourage the Knol Authors Foundation to either dissolve or find new leadership based on confirmed authorship of quality Knols, and to establish standards for entry into the group.

I am surprised to see this suggestion from a knol author. In any association, if there is a problem there will be changes in the organizing structure. But why dissolve an author association being developed to provide a committed authors' body for knol platform?

The issue of changes required in the association in light of the events is definitely under an open discussion in the author bulletin board.

http://knol.google.com/k/kalle-schwarz/knol-bulletin-board-for-authors-and/1m7f8ad2dgh39/41#

Last edited Apr 26, 2009 8:39 PM
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Randy unmasked, issues statement; Google issues statement

Randall Kleinert appears to be the public identity of Randy K. Mr. Kleinert issued the following statement this morning:

My name is Randy Kleinert. I am responsible for using Bass Pro articles without pemission (sic). I have been in contact with Laura Gustafson of Pillsbury Law (representing Bass Pro) about this matter. I have taken down the articles in question. All of the issues have been resolved. I am deeply sorry for what I did.

Randy Kleinert

Google issued a statement as well:

As with similar Google products that provide a platform for user-generated content, Knol will be subject to our general content policy and terms of service. Of course, we can't prevent people from doing things they shouldn't, but when we are made aware of a violation, we will act accordingly pursuant to our terms of service, content policies, and applicable laws and regulations. In some cases, that means that content will be taken down once the appropriate process is triggered.

Knol's DMCA copyright policy can be found online publicly at http://www.google.com/dmca_knol.html.
(See "Infringement Notification for Knol" section and follow steps to file an infringement.)

This writer has apprised Google of the following:

Randall Kleinert aka Randy K. used your service to publish nearly 400 stolen articles with a nominal word count of 1,300 each for a grand estimated copyright infringement of 500,000 words. We are still counting.

Randall hid behind his self-appointed Executive Director post at the Google Knol Authors Foundation. Like Bernie Madoff, Randall wore a mantle of respect, behind which he engineered massive copyright fraud for the purpose of enrichment through Knol links to his commercial websites. He even created or caused to be created several Google identities from which he boosted his own stolen Knols through Google's review system. He was his own best cheerleader and the reviews were as fraudulent as the Knols.

This is a lot different from asking friends, families, neighbors and colleagues to vote on your Knols.

The good news, and a possible spin for Google: The writing team of myself, Peter Baskerville and Krishan Maggon (1st, 13th and 41st top pick authors) used Google tools to expose the fraud. The discoveries made visible through these tools are published in a Knol: http://knol.google.com/k/krishan-maggon/knol-site-metrics/3fy5eowy8suq3/42#.

On behalf of our team, I encourage Google to block the account of Randall Kleinert and his alter egos and to encourage the Knol Authors Foundation to either dissolve or find new leadership based on confirmed authorship of quality Knols, and to establish standards for entry into the group.

By the way, the Foundation has blocked me from commenting at its many Knols and has been nonresponsive to my requests to remove my name from membership, which I resigned several days ago. What are we to conclude from this utter lack of transparency and pattern of denial?


Last edited Apr 22, 2009 12:49 PM
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If truly contrite, unmask yourself

I'm moving Randy K's second confession into a new comment to give it more visibility and to suggest that a truly contrite offender can begin rebuilding his reputation by unmasking himself.

Randy, you used the Foundation to mask your illegal activities, which drove sales at your website. Who are you, Randy K? Nearly all of us are verified, out in the open. Join us out in the open. You want a second chance? Unmask!

To the Foundation, I am one of three investigators whose work revealed Randy's illicit activities as he wrapped himself in the dignity of office. And how do you repay us? By blocking our ability to comment openly and transparently at the Foundation's Knols. What does this say about your leadership? Ugh.

Randy K wrote
I am deeply sorry for what I have done. I am in the process of deleting any knol that may be a copyright infringement.
It is up to the knol team to decide what must be done.
I appreciate the support from the foundation team.


Last edited Apr 22, 2009 8:16 AM
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Knol Help
Knol Help
Helping authors since 2008
Mountain View, CA
Article rating:
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Moderated collaboration
All signed in users can suggest edits to the knol, but these need approval from an author before being published
All Rights Reserved.
Version: 25
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Last edited: Apr 30, 2009 10:32 AM.

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