I love Wikipedia and I use it all the time.
“Google's Wikipedia competitor, Google Knol, officially opens its doors today. The site is already populated with several knols (definition: "an authoritative article about a specific topic"), but anyone can create their own knol as of today. The major difference between Google Knol and Wikipedia—as we pointed out in our original post—is that knols aren't collaboratively written in the same way Wikipedia articles are. Instead, a single user creates and moderates a knol…” LifeHacker
Knol is in beta so I should not be hard on it. Right now I sure do not like it and will not be using it. There seems to be very little data in Knol. I put in “Haulover Beach”, “bulletin board system”, “blog” and “Wikipedia.” It had no entry for any of those. Now this is Google that is setting this up and I think they could afford to pay someone to write an entry for some of those. Most of all they should have had staff write an entry for Wikipedia.
This is going to be interesting. There is no entry for “Blog” so I could create a entry (a “knol”) and moderate it. I do not see how that is going to work. Let us say that I am a nut and I think I invented blogging. I write that I am the guy who invented everything and if you do a search you find my entry on blog.
Wikipedia works because no one owns a subject. Others check it and edit it.
I do not think Google Knol is going to work. I hope I am wrong. I hope that Google Knol works out to be something that I can use.
Here is the Wikipedia entry for Knol.
