Google's Knol

  Google's Knol launched very recently, is quite similar to wikipedia.  I do think there is a fundamental difference between the two.  In wikipedia, I think, there would be only one page on any article and that can be edited by any person apart from the originator.  Whereas, when I tried searching in Knol, I found several articles on the same subject written by different authors.

  Recently, when I was searching for information about a particular item, I found the one in wikipedia to be the most accurate and the most updated one.  The feature of allowing anyone to edit any wikipedia page is the main reason behind wikipedia's success.  The contents of wikipedia would therefore most probably be the latest one on any subject.

  On the other hand, on searching Knol, one gets the feeling that the contents are individual-centric and can be edited / updated only by the individual concerned.   There is however a feature wherein any individual with a google account can edit any article, which would be sent to the owner of the piece for acceptance by him.  

  Let us wait and see how Knol can rival wikipedia. My feeling is that wikipedia is well established and it would rather be very difficult for knol to overcome wikipedia.  Wikipedia's success stems from the feature of allowing pages to be edited by anyone, which would invariably result in the pages getting updated immediately.  Just like, when Abhinav Bindra won the Gold at the Beijing Olympics,  I was rather anxious to find more details about him in the net.  To my surprise, I found that wikipedia had already updated the fact that he had won a Gold medal.

  Knol, can be successful, if the contributions come from experts, thereby enabling Knol to be become a truely reliable source of information.  But, that is a long way to go. By the way, wikipedia has already got Scholarpedia, which appears to be more or less similar to Google's Knol rather knol is similar to scholarpedia, since it was started much earlier than Knol.  

  Anyway, for people like us, it is boon that we have so many reference material available for free on the net.