Google’s Knol a threat to Wikipedia?
Posted by antonyvictorgino on January 17, 2008
Last Month Google announced the launch of the new project ‘Knol’. A free tool by Google to encourage people who know a particular subject to write authoritative article about it. Eventhough the idea is not so different from that of wikipedia or mahalo, one key aspect of Knol is the authors of the article will be displayed. Also Knol seems to offer incentives for authors in terms of recognition and money the two aspects that were lacking in Wikipedia.
Moving on to see how it might affect the growth of wikipedia, the web search to almost any particular topic in Google contains wikipedia pages in the first ten hits. Estimates suggests that almost 50% of the Wikipedia traffic comes through the Google search. Considering if the Knol is up and running in a few months time and if the Knol pages starts coming in the Google search results before the Wikipedia pages then the traffic of Wikipedia might go down drastically.
