Spam, plagiarism, and low quality content in Knol

Call for User Participation

User submitted ideas

• 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.

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