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.





Spiros Kakos
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Knol Administration Model - A discussion
Kyriacos Kyprou
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Spiros Kakos
And expect someone with a book on his CV to sit back and treat it as legitimate contribution in philosophy.
Religion has had its say for thousands of years now. And nothing at all has come from it. So religion needs to make way now for more sound perspectives of the Universe, evolution and humanity that philosophy and competent philosophers can provide.
And 'chemical engineers' should stick to chemical engineering and not abuse the lethal level of ignorance that remains to pretend to be someone they are not.
You will have to do a whole lot better than 'I think Jesus was a god' for me to get off your case.
Jesus was a human. And no one is going to insult my intelligence with the sort of crap you are riddling knol.google with.
And I don't care if you have friends in high places with trillions in the bank. You are not going to make knol.google your little castle to live out your idea of everything but also the totally unfounded assumptions you have of yourself.
And if google don't like it then I suggest that you delete my account.
But you will also then need to redefine democracy.
And I am a little better than what you have the capacity to give me credit for my friend. And as you can see the untouchable game you are trying to play is not all that it is made out to be with me.
Kyriacos Kyprou,
author of 'Religion, Politics and Psychology: An Invented Philosophy' and 'Gifted' (second book, as yet unpublished).
Kyriacos Kyprou
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Spiros Kakos
This guy cannot pretend and insist he has something viable to offer the field of philosophy.
I am sorry google only looks at popularity.
What this man is doing here is called obsession.
He has only the one objective of living out his idea of everything including self assumptions.
Kyriacos Kyprou,
author of 'Religion, Politics and Psychology: An Invented Philosophy' and 'Gifted' (second book, as yet unpublished).
Kyriacos Kyprou
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Spiros Kakos
But it seems some things like Spiros Kakos are exempt from that rule.
They can sh*t their way through. And we mustn't intrude - this is Spiros Kakos world.
Well I don't quite or even f*cking agree and I have up to forty theories that run into over five books to say that this guy is sticking his nose in where it doesn't belong and won't hear anything on the contrary.
What bugs me google man is how morons like Spiros Kakos use frustration and clique tactics to get what they want any way and anyhow.
That is not nice google man. Trillionaires and we rule the world.
Delete my crap and keep your friend - frame the dick.
But bear in mind that I am the man and no trillions will ever take that away from me.
Some things money can't buy. But frustration and a few friends come in handy in disguising the truth.
Kyriacos Kyprou,
author of 'Religion, Politics and Psychology: An Invented Philosophy' and 'Gifted' (second book, as yet unpublished).
Peter Baskerville
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Can you use a Knol as a sales page?
http://knol.google.c
"On knol we are allowed to conduct our business. That is buying and selling is a legitimate use of Knol as knol itself declares. Were you not aware of this?" Will Johnson.
Is he right?
For me it is just another example of 'low quality content'.
Will Johnson wrote:
It appears that you cut part of the policy and didn't read the entire paragraph which states: "COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY: You may use Knol to create articles for your business or to promote your lawful products or services that are not otherwise prohibited by our Content Policy or Terms of Service, unless you are in Cuba, Iran, Burma (Myanmar), North Korea, Syria, or Sudan. There are some commercial uses we don’t allow. We don’t allow pages that have the primary purpose of redirecting visitors, acting as a bridge page, or driving traffic to another website. We also don’t allow Knol pages that have the primary purpose of profiting from displaying ads from any publisher network, such as pages created with little or no unique content that exist only to display ads."
Please note that you "*may* use Knol to create articles for your business or to promote your lawful products or services...." You appear to be unclear on the distinction that is being drawn here. Knol has no prohibition against creating commercial knols in general. Only those whose primary purpose it to act as bridges, etc. The one of mine to which you objected however does not drive traffic anywhere, and so is entirely within the policy as I see it.
Peter's response, which I sincerely hope resembles your response:
Will, I think you are taking great liberties with your interpretation of Knol's Content Policy. I would have thought that your Knols fail to meet the grade because they are "pages created with little or no unique content that exist only to display ads"
To clear up this issue I have posted a question to Knol Help about your merchandise sale Knols that I believe are just advertisements. I had always thought that Knol was a library, and I have never gone to a library to buy Bose 2.0 Speakers.
Either way I think that the vast majority of authors here would think that your actions now shadow you and your work here in the 'low quality' category. Are these your 'true colors?'. Be careful, you may lose far more than you gain by this. Why trade respect for a handful of dollars? I would wait to see what Knol-Help thinks before pushing the defense of this concept too far.
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And grateful for your response. Thanks. Knols as ads are welcome.
Will you now modify your own Best Practices Knol, which clearly states Don't Post Advertisements?
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Thanks for your continued vigilance against low-quality and spammy content and general encouragement of Knol's best practices.
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<bold><font size gigantic>
What's the point of continued vigilance? Or best practices?
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If that's right, I am amazed that Google is so toothless. Or so nonchalant.
I suggest that, at the very minimum, the Content Policy is tightened up before the next passing opportunist drives a coach and horses through it. Who knows what damage he or she might do?
What a shame that this little episode has demeaned knol at the precise moment when it was showing real signs of flourishing into something significant.
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Krishan Maggon
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Please help
1. A knol author during the past few months has stolen ideas, data and methods from my/our knols without citation. Within few days of my posting or revisions, he has created new knols using the same data or with slight changes, or the basic idea and claims as the first knol author and used the figures in his comments, revisions or created new knols. The original source or knol has never been mentioned.
What is the way forward to deal with it and send a message to all authors to desist from such practises.
2. I have followed eHow for some time and frankly outraged at the sudden jump in their PVs at the rate of 33000 PV per week. Please check and make sure that the system is not gamed in some way and the PVs are real
It can be really annoying to have someone steal your content and reproduce it as their own. However the content on this page is what I suggest you to read and follow steps to report low quality content. Also, 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.co
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.
Secondly, as you are concerned about ehow and the page visits I am not in a position to comment on that as it is an external site.
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Norman Creaney
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cc licence
If, under the same circumstances, that person puts their copy on knol (with proper attribution) then I don't feel quite so happy.
Questions:
Is my reaction rational?
Can I allow one and disallow the other?
Does Google have a policy on this - other than a purely legal view based on copyright.
Hope that helps. Also, I'm not a lawyer, so this should be taken with some amount of salt.
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Norman Creaney
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A happy outcome on this one
Thank you for your prompt action Cong™ Huynh Thanh.
Norman
Murry Shohat
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Direct Knol-Knol Copyright Infringement
S/He has copied several Knols and claimed authorship. He only appends "Copy of" to the title, but gives no credit to the real authors. What might be the motive to this? Adsense revenue? "See what I got away with?" Wow, those Knol guys are easy to fool?
This could go viral. Game of the day: see how many Knols you can republish as your own.
Google, if you force the actual authors to follow DMCA guidelines to protect our work, the burden may drive us away. It's onerous to document each incident when the evidence is plainly visible. I am hoping that you respond swiftly and firmly to our flags on the affected Knols and to our voices here.
Suggested Flag - P-ASS Award
I'm going to use the following flag on Knol-Knol copies and encourage others to follow suit or craft your own:
Title: Celebrating Your DMCA Violation
As one of several Knol authors whose work is being directly copied by you and others (we are known as the Plagiarized Authors Secret Society, or PASS), I am pleased to present you with our P-ASS award for your brazen conduct.
To help others earn the award, kindly respond to this comment. State your motive for copying our work. We plan to compile collected motives into an article or Knol under the working title "10 Best Copy-and-Paste Hacks for Knol Plagiarizers."
Although you replaced our authorship with your name in the work you've expropriated, we promise to give you full credit for your hack if we use it. Of course, only one P-ASS award winner can earn first credit for a hack, so speed is of the essence.
Keep up the bad work. You may earn other awards, such as the lofty and highly valued IgKnol-bell prize.
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Gratitude!
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Norman Creaney
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Hoping for a quick resolution.
I have flagged it for mine and will notify other original authors as well.
I think we need a 'quick' flag of an entire author's work located on their home page. These two recent examples shows that the current system of comments/reviews/ind
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