Google's Wikipedia clone Knol launches.

There are many things about this project that don't make any sense, as others have commented; it is not a wiki, does not compete with Wikipedia, seems to stand alone from other Google products in terms of design and yet they still haven't changed the name even after the owner of knol.com refused to sell.<p>One of the things that I like about Wikipedia is that I can just hand craft a /wiki/Title URL - Knol's URLs are obfuscated behind strange ID's and author's names. Do they not consider these things?<p>On a similar topic, I'll never understand why they decided to shelve Google Answers - there could have been a great synergy between that community and a wiki.<p>Knol will fail simply because it does not beat Wikipedia in any respect.<p>Was this born from a 20% side project by any chance? I can imagine some executive sitting behind his desk thinking "we need to buy wikipedia, but we can't.. so anyway, this knol thing looks close enough.. let's promote it to production".

Looks like an About.com clone, to me. There's no "wiki" involved here...the point of a wiki is "anyone can edit it", not what data the wiki happens to contain. WikiPedia is first, and foremost, a wiki. (Secondly, it's a culture. The data it contains only comes in a distant third, I think.)

Does anybody else think the design looks a bit two-faced?<p>Serious-looking, authoritative text - and a round, cartoony button asking you to help out.<p>EDIT: Also, the site can't seem to decide whether it wants to be single-spaced or double-spaced. And it's not certain of what fonts it wants to use, either.

Not really sure why people keep calling this a Wikipedia clone - seems much closer to Squidoo than to Wikipedia, to me. Granted, that's a debate that's already been had and done (back in December, if I recall correctly).<p>* disclaimer: I have worked with Squidoo in the past, and still have a couple of lenses there. I'm not taking a position on which is better - just pointing out a better comparison.

Curious the front page has "Who needs a search engine? Ctrl+F" on the right hand side above the listing of Knols...

From the article:<p><i>We are happy to announce an agreement with the New Yorker magazine which allows any author to add one cartoon per knol from the New Yorker's extensive cartoon repository. Cartoons are an effective (and fun) way to make your point, even on the most serious topics.</i><p>Is today April 1? Does adding a pseudo-intellectual New Yorker cartoon to every page really make the information seem more useful to people?

Great, another Google service I am forced to use to increase the search rank of my web site :-(<p>Edit: done entering a knol about "Mondkalender" (moon calendars). I really have mixed feelings about this... What would people's incentive be to write on knol rather than on their own blog? Presumably Knol articles will be rated higher, so Google's power forces people to use Knol (certainly no SEO will skip knolling). On the other hand with the rating and personal credibility effect, it could yield some interesting results.

One of the reasons I love wikipedia is that its neutral and no ads. Google Im sure will have plans to stick in some adsense and share revenue with the author. Why should I contribute to an article bcos of which the original author might get paid.<p>Even if there willbe no ads , with the author's profile there, any contribution I may make doesnt feel like, Im part of it. I love all contibutors being annonymous in wikipedia<p>I vote this me-too project down.

This looks like something really great. I think that a "google wikipedia clone" can only benefit the web, by offering innovative features to the "web encyclopedia" space. This is something distinctly different and I like it. From the short time i've spent on the site it looks like this could be pretty big.

In other news, knol.com seems awfully slow today.

The big difference I see is that you can have several competing knols on the same or overlapping subjects.<p>Big consequences - you don't need to spend a lot of time and effort enforcing NPOV through consensus - people can express their own POV

The articles, even those by MDs, read like the sort of padded, plodding writing-for-hire crap used to manipulate Google's rankings.<p>Google should be fighting "MFA" (Made-For-Adsense) content, not joining the party.

Still, what I'd like most from an open encyclopedia project is a simple, stable API. There are external projects bringing this to Wikipedia, but Google (API frontrunners that they sometimes are) don't have this at all. Hope they add it soon.

Knol? Knoll?<p>Will there be any confusion with Knoll, the 80 year-old internationally recognized and respected design institution?

What is to stop people from ripping articles from wikipedia and posting them en masse to earn adsense revenue?

Knol doesn't distinctly look like a google page. It seems like they are trying a new layout and design.

Yet another attempt by Google!!! Knol.... hmmmm... Maybe Google should try acquiring wikipedia instead.. ;) !!!