Google's "Knol" poses challenge to Wikipedia

Internet search giant Google on Thursday announced its plans to roll out a web-based publishing platform similar to Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia available on the Web.

According to Google’s official blog, the search company is developing an online publishing platform, dubbed “knol”, where people can write articles on their own areas of expertise, a move that will potentially challenge Wikipedia's user-contributed encyclopedia.

The new user-generated online encyclopedia from Google though allows users to share their knowledge in the same way as the Wikipedia platform, but with key differences. Unlike Wikipedia, Google's new Knol, which stands for a unit of knowledge, will include the names of authors, and, again in contrast to Wikipedia, all editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors.

"The key idea behind the Knol project is to highlight authors," wrote Udi Manber, Google's vice president of engineering, in the official blog post. "We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content."

Google will not edit any individual entry or knol in any way and will not certify any content, but it will decide the order in which the “knols” are ranked within its search engine. Entries that Google rates to be of higher quality will be given a higher page ranking in Google search.

Entries in the Knol encyclopedia, which according to Google, is currently in an invitation-only testing phase, can't be edited or revised by other people. But, readers will be able to rank and review others' entries, which will then be interpreted by Google's search engine when displaying results.

Google said the goal of the project is to provide information on a wide range scientific, medical, geographical, historical, entertainment and other topics. The search giant added that it intends the knols to develop into a warehouse of knowledge.

Google said experts in every field are invited to write authoritative articles and put them on the site, and repetition of entries on the same subjects is beneficial. "Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing Knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing. Once testing is completed, participation in Knol will be completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be of high quality," Manber said.

The author of a knol can choose to include advertising within his /her article, and receive the revenue from advertisements next to the articles.

Launched in January 2001, Wikipedia, the anyone-can-edit encyclopedia, is a noncommercial project that is one of the Web’s most popular sites. Any individual who has access to the website can edit content.

Wikipedia operates with servers in Florida, Amsterdam, and Seoul. It has published over 8 million articles in 253 languages.

Wikipedia has been inviting controversy off and on, over its reliability and accuracy due to the fact that readers can edit entries. Some of those incidents have forced Wikipedia to introduce safe guards into its entry creation and editing process.