If you're familiar with Wikipedia then you might be interested in Google’s imminent launch of its knowledge portal similar to Wikipedia, Codename ‘Knol’. Google’s Knol is currently in ‘by invitation only beta’ with several people already invited to try out Google’s new product.

Knol stands for a ‘unit of knowledge’ and in essence is a new knowledge portal aimed at covering all possible branches of knowledge in a similar way that Wikipedia works.  Anyone can be an author which is the basic premise on why Google is developing Knol – to empower the author in every one of us. An important point here is to highlight that Google will not in any way act on editorial capacity to content published on Knol. It is therefore a free for all where authors can write and edit articles on various subjects much like Squidoo and Hubpages. 

Here is a screenshot of Knol:

An advantage that Google will have is allowing users to put their own names on each article so that they can get the credit they deserve. This also means that they will also get the reward with their share of the money coming from any revenue generated by Google Adsense on each article.

Unfortunately from a linking perspective, I feel this will bring great joy to spammers across the globe once they know that Knol is open to everyone and yet another site they can get free links on.  Perhaps Google has something in mind to counter act this which leads on to my next question, if Google won’t have editing and conducting QA of articles published in Knoll, how can they ensure that the articles to be published are authoritative and actually came from reliable sources? The answer, Google is relying on everyone’s reputation which would be put online. I expect a lot of duplication of articles as Knol gets into full blast. Google has already stated it won’t prevent duplication of articles but instead encourage competition of these articles. 

Will Knol threatening the existence of Wikipedia? The Wikipedia Foundation is a non profit organisation which forms the legal umbrella for the Wikipedia site. Wikipedia is a very successful open service allowing users to contribute information to the community at large. Currently Wikipedia is generated by the 75,000 registered contributors in 250 languages serving in excess of 9,000,000 articles. 

This source of information has been constantly attacked by librarians and educators for inaccuracies but Wikipedia has continued to grow and become an extremely successful source of information. 

The Knol model will allow users to add information using a journal format. Google will provide its users with the tools and facilities to distribute their Knol to potentially billions of internet users. Authors will maintain the Knol and opt into the share in advertisement revenue unlike the not for profit model of Wikipedia. The only advert on Wikipedia site is for donations to continue development and maintenance.

Google’s move to create a new encyclopedia is bold and some might say a ‘monopolistic’ direction but perhaps these people should take a closer look at Google’s mission statement. 

"To organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”. 

However, I can understand this point of view as many people think of Google as solely a search engine and not as a company cataloguing facts and knowledge.

In summary, I do not expect Google Knol to dislodge Wikipedia as the first point of call for facts and figures. I believe that the Knol project will more likely develop into a well indexed store for essays and journals rather that an encyclopaedia, thus preventing a Betamax versus VHS situation and ensuing format war which is likely to be lost by Wikipedia due large sums of money available at Google.