Google launches Wikipedia rival

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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Search engine giant Google yesterday took the wraps off its latest project: a Wikipedia clone. The new project is called Knol (http://knol.google.com) and, like Wikipedia, is based on user submissions.

Google originally announced the new project seven months ago but only made it available to a select, invitation-only, group of contributors. Yesterday the company opened the site to all users and those with Google usernames will be able to start contributing immediately.

On the official Google blog the company says that "the key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good."

Knol also builds in a way for contributors to work together. Called "moderated collaboration" it allows any reader to make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. "This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content," Google said.

Google is also hoping to monetise the new project by allowing knol authors to choose whether they want Google’s AdSense advertising on the pages of the knol. "If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements."

Google Knol discussion