Google has made public of its intentions to launch a tool that encourages the community to contribute and share knowledge via written articles, a concept similar to that of user-generated online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
However, the Internet behemoth intends to differentiate itself from Wikipedia by attributing the articles to the author and allowing only the author of the page to edit it.
Dubbed as “knol” which stands for a unit of knowledge, the website is currently in its first phase of testing and scheduled to go live to the public in a few months.
“Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it…The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content,” said Udi Manber, VP for Engineering in a Google blog.
knols will cover topics from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions.
Google said it will not serve as an editor in any way and all editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors.
“We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing,” Manber commented.
Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content etc.
“At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads,” said Manber.
”Once testing is completed, participation in knols will be completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be of high quality. Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge." |
