Google has finally lifted the veil of its Wikipedia competitor, called Knol, after seven months of rigorous testing.
AHMEDABAD: Google has finally lifted the veil of its Wikipedia competitor, called Knol, after seven months of rigorous testing.
Launching the service on Wednesday, product manager Cedric Dupont explained on the official Google blog: “Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects.”
What differentiates a knol from a Wikipedia entry is attribution. While Google will accept a knol only if it can verify the author (or a group of authors), Wikipedia offers anonymity.
“It’s their (authors’) knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good,” Dupont wrote along with software engineer Michael McNally on the blog.
This means that unlike Wikipedia, where there is one web page per topic, alterable by any internet user, Knol would provide multiple pages on the same topic.
Dupont and McNally say the principle behind Knol is different from open source collaboration where everybody has a right to tinker with a product. “With Knol, we are introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call ‘moderated collaboration’. With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public.”
The feature lets authors accept suggestions but retain control over content.
Moreover, while Wikipedia has remained a charitable effort, Google hopes to make information sharing a money-making enterprise. “At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from our AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements.”
Effectively, Google is offering a monetary incentive to create good content. The best articles will show up high in search and will generate the maximum revenue. However, there is a risk of the scheme backfiring: for popular subjects the system would work well, but on topics unlikely to be much referenced, individuals may not find much of an incentive to write.
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