The trouble with Knol

Is that that it’s going to be full of rubbish. Wikipedia , which arguably has less authority because contributions can be anonymous, will likely have more authority, since it is more-or-less restricted by its community to one entry per topic. Another way of looking at this is that on Wikipedia, if you want to contribute to a topic that already has an article, you have no choice but to (try and) improve the existing one. On Google Knol , there’s every incentive to start a new one, never mind if it duplicates existing content, or is worse than an existing one. Take Search Engine Optimization, for example. Wikipedia has an article that looks decent . Knol has thirty articles ; or if you search for SEO, more like seventy . And that’s after just a few days. Google is good at ranking, and users can rate pages, but Knol is still a mess. You can be sure that many articles will be written primarily to drive traffic to the author’s web site, or to attract Adsense c...