Google launches Wikipedia rival Knol

Google's Wikipedia competitor, Knol, was opened to the public on Wednesday morning.

So-called knols are articles about specific topics written by experts on that subject.

Google is partnering with The New Yorker magazine to allow any author to add a cartoon from the magazine to their knol. Knol authors can run ads with them, as well, and receive a cut of the revenue from Google.

What makes Knol different from Wikipedia is that every knol will have an author, or group of authors, whose name is prominent.

"The big difference is authorship is highlighted," Cedric Dupont, Knol product manager, said in an interview with ZDNet.co.uk sister site CNET News.com. "In the long term, we hope that encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia, would use knols as references... If Knol is successful, it will help Wikipedia."

People can submit comments, and rate and review knols. Authors can choose to close their knol so that no-one else can edit it, make it completely open to others to edit — like a wiki — or keep the default "moderated collaboration" mode, in which the author selects which edits to allow.

"We think moderated-collaboration mode will solve a large part of the problem" of complaints about accuracy that have plagued Wikipedia, Dupont said. There will, no doubt, be multiple knols on any one topic.

There will not be a Knol destination site or portal, but people can see some highlights on the main Knol page and search by subject or author. Every knol will be treated like any other web page, crawled by Google's spider and indexed in the search engine.

"The ultimate goal is: we want to improve search," Dupont added.

Knol was announced late last year.

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