Google Knol is a Latter-day Wikipedia?

According to official blog of Google it is coming up with a creative method of sharing knowledge called Google “Knol”. It is especially designed to allow users to contribute content/articles on any topic of their interest. Other users would be allowed to rate, comment, or edit on the content/articles if the primary author allows. This sounds like Google is reinventing Wikipedia with a new name called Google Knol. However, Google says that a Knol is a “unit of knowledge,” which is in turn an attempt to gather and share human knowledge.

The most impressive part of Google Knol for the users is that it allows ads to appear alongside the content and they could achieve a share of revenue (Google does not mention the share ratio) in case of any. Google is offering all the tools to write this, and host the content and so on, so that writers could concentrate just on the content. Then, ad revenues those pages shaped can be shared. Google Knol pages would be hosted entirely by Google. Authors would have access to enable Google ads and share its revenue. This knowledge-sharing tool is not yet officially out; it is currently under an invitation-only status.

With huge lot of content/articles across the web, it is actually difficult to find something that is excellent. Even at the places like Wikipedia, it is not easy to experience accuracy, so the question often comes, Will Knol kill Wikipedia? I think it would not kill Wikipedia; rather, it would make it stronger, since the Knol articles/content could, and almost certainly would be, used as respected sources for Wikipedia entries.

The handful reason you might desire to contribute to Knol is double if you read the article correctly. Firstly, unlike Wikipedia, your name would be published. Secondly, the author gets a cut of revenue. It is simple, if I get a few articles in Knol; the income from the ads I generate has the potential to be good. Thirdly, it seems that Google is challenging Wikipedia with a similar version of Wiki but monetizing with ads. It would surely beats having Wiki web pages landing as number 1 in the search engine’s result. So it would be a high-quality idea to contribute the content to Knol other than Wiki. This could be one of the best ways to make money blogging.

On the other hand, critics say Knol is not possible to replace Wikipedia at least in another 5-6 years. Wikipedia is long-established source for articles/content for most of the age group. Knol concept is very different from Wikipedia’s concept: Knol is a stage for individually-written articles with author pictures and bylines, not for joint articles by nameless contributors. It actually sounds a bit like Suite101.com without adult supervision. It no way going to replace Wikipedia; if it survives a while, it’ll be one of many "user-created content" aggregators, challenging with properties that, in some cases, Google itself already owns.

To conclude, user-contributed content seems always unreliable with less user-friendly features. We need to know the sources in order to judge on something, just think the numbers of false reviews, which are doing the rounds at the moment, for instance. So the real question is how strongly are Google is going to examine the credentials of people who contribute to Knol?

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