Google “Knol” competes with Wikipedia?
“Knol”..shortcut for “knowledge”.
One of the goals of Google is to encourage people to contribute knowledge. Google wants to provide all the tools to write this, and host the content and so on, so that experts can focus just on the content. In contrast to Wikipedia, each page will be written by a single author and cannot be edited by others. Also, there would be multiple articles for the same topic.
So actually not a lot like Wikipedia at all.
Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information.
Wikipedia is currently PR8 and is the leading website for this kind of approach on users. I wonder if Google would have no issues regarding “biases” on the SERPS regarding this.








Comments
It almost sounds like the web prior to the advent of e-commerce. If anyone can create their own page, presumably include multimedia content and links, and if others can’t edit it, it sounds pretty much like a home page.
I wonder if that is Google’s long term plan — to not just index the internet, but to replace it.
Cromely
December 27th, 2007