A Rival To Wikipedia?
Seems Google is creating its own version of online user-based knowledge sharing, which by all indications appears to be Wiki-based with better community features, and quite similar to Wikipedia and About. Here is an indicative sample of a page. As the Google Blog puts it:
Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.
At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.
However, since one of the objectives here is also to highlight authors, this is one of the distinctions from Wikipedia, where anonymity is one of the most endearing features, and probably one of the features that encourages the community.
Now to see how the Netizens take to it. Would you?
Filed under: Digital culture, Ideas & Innovations, Website Alert