Google loves the content of Wikipedia. Just do some Google searches and you’ll see the Wikipedia articles among the top results. While Google tries to battle Wikipedia and to create their own encyclopaedia ( under the name Knol), I thought I should share my thoughts with you as a Wikipedia administrator. But Larry Sanger, the head and founder of Citizendium, the expert-encyclopaedia, has beat me to it:

There are a few problems.

First, quality. It looks to me as if Knol is a high-level attempt to do what many others have done… Time will tell, but Knol will probably resemble other such websites, and have a huge amount of mediocre content, with a little excellent content mixed in. The concept does not sound like a model that would attract many genuine experts. I say that because the notion that anyone may write a “knol” and be compared and ranked by “the crowd” — not by expert peers — is apt to attract relatively little notice from experts who are very careful about where they publish.

Second, lack of buy-in from the free culture crowd. Many of the sort of people who contribute knowledge to projects like Wikipedia and the Citizendium are likely to be very skeptical of a giant corporation organizing such a project, particularly with Google Ads appearing on the articles. It does not appear to be in the spirit of the free culture movement. Still, it is good that Google has decided to make ads optional.

As an encyclopaedia, Knol has no chance against Wikipedia or Citizendium. As an other place for advertisements where people can promote their products, it seems to be a perfect solution. We’ll see…

I highlighted the features: article rating, Google ads and peer reviews.

Stan Schroeder from Mashable weighed in with this opinion:

The question you need to ask yourself is: would Wikipedia be better if you were able to see the name and picture of the author in every article?

My answer is: hell no. Sorry, folks, but I don’t really care who wrote which sentence in a Wikipedia article. I presume that someone with some degree of authority has set up to write the article, and if he/she were wrong about something, the community jumped in and edited the article, correcting the errors.

That’s what it is all about! Read more on this:

• Attacs at Pimm
• TechCrunch
• Wikipedia Signpost
• Google Blogoscoped
• Mashable
• Constructive Medicine
• Medical 2.0