Google’s Wiki project is still in an early beta stage and participation is only through invitation. Entries in the Google Wiki are called knols, which stand for units of knowledge organized by topics like entertainment or history.
However Google’s rival Wiki offering comes with a few different twists, like paying greater attention to identifying bylined authors, not allowing other people to edit or revise knols and the inclusion of ads.
Google’s vice president of engineering, Udi Manber, believes that the Web development community has overlooked the importance of knowing bylined authors. Anyone can write about any topic…and repetition of entries on the same subjects is beneficial…[but we also] believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of that Web content, Manber wrote on the official Google blog last week.
To that end each knol, which is technically a Web page, will also have a photo placeholder for its author on it. Their entries however can’t be edited or revised by other people, which Wikipedia allows. But Google will allow other users to rank and review the knol entries, which will be used by Google’s search engine when displaying results in ranked order.
This type of peer-review is similar to the way in which Yahoo ranks responses to questions on its Answers site. Additionally most blogs also have forms whereby readers can make comments.
Knol authors can also allow Google to place ads on their knols. Google said it will give the owners a substantial portion of revenue generated by those ads. Keyword ads have been a major growth business from Google in past years.
Mountain View, California-based Google said it will provide web hosting and editing tools to support the growth of its Wiki which has a lot of ground to make up on Wikipedia, which already includes over 7 million articles in over 200 different languages. The articles, which are constantly being updated by anonymous users, are edited by a network of officially vetted editors.
