The Difference Between Google Knol & Wikipedia Encyclopedia

I hope it will become succesful.

Isn’t this similar to hubpages.com ?

hey i think wikipedia is far more better than knol,,,but who knows as google is promoting it ,,it may become a huge success..but at the end of the day everybody is gonna use wikipedia as it has high page rank on all search engines..

Rishav,
I think the fact that you can make money on it + the fact that it is a google website will bring a large amount of people on it and it should be able to compete with wikipedia.

Knol is more like Squidoo and Hubpages. Also, Wikipedia has comment feature too (discusssion), just not very visible.

By the way, I really like option to edit comment on your blog. Good job.

But is this really a wikipedia style encyclopedia? Think and think again!! It will lead you to conclude that it is not actually a wikipedia style encyclopedia.
Reasons as follows:
1) Wikipedia has one page per topic but that limit is relaxed on Google Knol - multiple authors can write on the same topic at different places.
Impact–> similar to a blog or an article by any other site. What wikipedia does is it gets the best of contents to be published on a topic at one place, so that you dont have to go through various versions of it at other places.

2)Also theres a provision to import your existing blogs which also lends support to the reasons given in point 1.

Conclusion: It’s no where near Wikipedia, just a platform where all would like to publish to make money. The articles found on Knol would have otherwise required a great search engine like Google to find them from myriad sites.
Wikipedia will rule for ever, always.

The HTML code generated by KNOL has many redundancies and is also not readable at once. It can be further improved. I checked this using Firebug, which gave me neat presentation of code and also a lot of redundant code.

If feels like a (boring) version of a Squidoo lens to me. But what do I know?

Only thing that I am not sure is a good idea, as one can have more than one article on same subject. This will confuse the readers on which one to accept and which one not to. If there are dozens of article on same subject, it would be an issue to go through all of them.

To me, Knol is more like a combination of about.com, wikianswers.com, wikipedia.org, and wikihow.org. At their current states, here is what I think…

Wikipedia > Wikihow > Wikianswers.com > Knol > about.com

Note: About.com is still a great resource, just not compared to the others.

You are not 100% correct on your last point (f). Wikipedia has discussion pages, which are open spaces where anyone can leave comments/debate an item.

after reading the comparisions….think wiki is still much better….

Knol is ,in fact more similar to Squidoo then to Wikipedia.

It’s more close to Squidoo, hubpages and even blogger. There is nothing worst than this can you imagine from Google to fight Wikipedia.

It does not look professional and does not even stand to say itself a competitor of Wikipedia. Many people were saying that Google Knol is a Wikipedia killer, now after seeing Knol, I can feel, how much time Google devoted to make such a terrible looking product.

Knol is nothing more than a money making machine for Google. I feel that unfortunately many knol authors will copy content from our good old Wikipedia.

Only thing that I am not sure is a good idea

google knol might b good…i wud still support wikipedia…as it is so user friendly and one can edit articles without trouble…

I still like Wikipedia, but it adds another place for me to do my references for work. =)

d) On Wikipedia, you cannot create pages for self-promotion while that’s not the case with Knol as their content policy clearly says - “You may use Knol to create articles for your business or to promote your lawful products or services.”

it seems that using Knol to promote website is not a good method, because in Knol all links are taged “nofollow” .

Google Knol is welcome. As the taste of the pudding lies in the eating, I would rather cross my fingers until it becomes operative and gives service as good as Wikipedia

Amit there is a typing mistake in this post

*Know* do get an opportunity to monetize content that they share on Knol through Google AdSense.

:)