well like it says google realeaced a wikipedia rival, check this article from webware. i went there to try it out but there wasnt a lot of topics to look at so i cant say it's great now but you know google everybody loves them it's only a matter of time before they probably kill wikipedia.

i think this has an up side because it's not ment for just rendom anonomous writing but it displays the author or authors of the article so it's more reliable, especialy if writen by a proffessional in that field. so i hope this one gets far and has a lot more articles soon

It just might be my first impression, but I think Google's aproach is distancing itself from the concept of encyclopedias.

Encyclopedias are like knowledge brought together, a lot of informations about a topic in one place, brought there by different people.
Even in its pure meaning, I think of encyclopedias as just anonymous peoples' work, gathering informations about different subjects.

And Wikipedia is really good, I'd be surprised if Google could do something better.

if you ask me ....Can anyone beat Wikipedia and become a more dominant online encyclopedia....i won't think twice to say NO...
but with Google...I don't know... they have always come up with great surprises....may be, because its google..people will think giving it a try....but still ...fat chance..let's see ...

I think of that as the exact down-side.

It can't be as collective and global as Wikipedia and besides there are always views opposing each other in various Scientific fields especially when it comes to experts of that field. Wikipedia is reliable too since every input is later evaluated by the community and all instances of vandalism are rectified soon.

I really don't think Google will make much with Knol. Google can't re-invent the wheel. It didn't do all that great with Blogger and I don't think it will do all that good with this service too.

Knol looks to be quite different from Wikipedia, as the articles don't have the 'anybody can edit' touch to them. Due to being quite new, Knol also has an extremely small database of information, for example a search for 'cake' returned no results.
Information is much more spread than in Wikipedia - The authors name and checksums in the URL means I can't simply type a word I'm searching for at the end of a link to find information about it (e.g. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cake).
Another point where Wikipedia is better is the way articles are linked. In Wikipedia, learning random information by using 'See also' list can even be, to some degree, fun! I don't see this happening in Knol as not only is there no visible equivalent to 'See also', articles are much more specialized.

Overall, I feel that Wikipedia is much better than Knol. But I'm probably biased to Wikipedia...
Knol might be better for looking up medical information though!

This post has been edited by Nabb: Jul 24 2008, 12:59 PM

How is Knol a competition? It's not near to Wikipedia.

I would have to agree with klusk on this one. I would also say nobody can beat Wikipedia in what it does but since this is Google, who knows. They are full of surprises. Anyway, Knol looks more like a knowledgebase and not like encyclopaedia so I don't see how it would compete with Wikipedia directly. What I like about it is an option of comments and rating of articles (knols) and it's not true articles will be closed to public editing. This is totally up to the author as he will be visible to everybody.

You never know.

Google's been on the prowl on a ton of different side projects that most people aren't even aware of, even though it's open to the public. I was personally at a work site where they had workers with sophisticated scanning machines taking images of book pages... so you will be able to access a virtual library with Google soon, methinks. (I wouldn't expect it for a while, but I'm usually surprised and proven wrong on that matter. ) This is another side project and since Google is a well-known name around the globe, people will flock to it just to see what it's about. Most of the starting user base will be people who like and trust Google to put out new, cool stuff.

Remember when we thought that Yahoo was the best of search engines? How about AltaVista? Lycos? Do we even remember that they were search engines? I used to be a loyal fan of Infoseek.com, then some metacrawler, then AltaVista, then a9 (when Amazon had their promotion), and then finally Google. Knol might be our next source of information next to Wikipedia, if it can catch up to what Wiki already has for an encyclopedic database. Will you fuel the Google empire in the future and cast away Wiki?

I just took a look at Knol and I am a Wiki fanboy, but this could give people the opportunity to throw out their expertise and be recognized for it. What kind of stinks is that it looks like once someone covers a topic/subject, it's locked and whatever further contributions anyone wants to make to it will be redundant. On the flipside, the original author of the first article may not be aware of several aspects of his or her own work and others cannot throw in important inserts of information that would benefit the reader in any way. (If you want to suggest inserting information into comments, look at YouTube comments and then think about it. )

I see that a lot of medical professionals have already jumped the gun and made their own articles, but on the same token, are they just rehashing other people's work and calling it their own just to be able to say that "I write for Knol?" I'm not talking about plagiarism... I'm talking about the massive amount of references that a lot of "professionals" have under their work. It's like someone read up on the topic and rehashed it to make them look like a subject matter expert. If that's the case, we could all be professionals in any given field...

It will be an interesting alternative, but Knol will have to offer more if it will want to become an alternative resource name in my eyes. We already use Google as a verb and turn to Wiki for our questions... will Google further impact our Internet culture that much?

It will be interesting to see this "Expert Information Exchange" develop.
It appears that they are attracting only input from experts, particularly in the Health area, for now.

Maybe I should write an article about Moderating a Forum.

Link to the Google Knol here: http://knol.google.com