Wikipedia, the largest multilingual free encyclopedia, has been running and standing tall since the year 2001. Operated by The Wikimedia Foundation, it was the fastest growing open content project in the internet world. A reader or visitor can edit the information along with reading it and gaining knowledge, but the visitor is limited to only editing.

Google, world’s largest search engine, has now decided to launch a new free tool which includes generation of original articles by any user who perfectly knows about something. Google announced about this on December 13th. 2007 and this is still under beta testing, and is expected to be released very soon.

According to Udi Manber, VP Engineering says that the main aim for this project is to highlight the authors of articles of every topic. Books, Magazines and Journals have the Author name highlighted on their cover, the same when seen on the web would make the author level much higher.

Check out the Preview of Knol

Accd. to people at Google, Knol is a unit of knowledge. This is a going to be a big competition by Google to the presently popular Wiki. An example of article page in the future Knol can be seen here. A knol can be written by a single author, and it can be edited only by the permission of the author. Google has still to decide whether it is going to place the ads on the article page, and the author may also get benefited with the adsense revenue sharing. And apart from Adsense, ads from other companies might also be allowed. Writers who have the experience with good writing, will just have to write, and the rest of the things like hosting etc. will be looked upon by Google!

Every kind of topic such as web development, health, business, geography, physical and chemical topics are in the focus for the authors to publish. Popularity of the author is guaranteed as the search results in google for any topic will be displaying probably Knol pages in the topic and the author will be well known easily. This project is going to challenge many quality content sites such as Wikipedia, Scholarpedia, AssociatedContent and About.com and Knol is going to have more similarity to About.com than Wikipedia. Wikimedia foundation welcomed Knol by stating that “The more good free content, the better for the world.”

It is expected that Google’s new project might be overtaking Wikipedia and people will love browsing and reading the content in Knol rather than Wiki. Unlike Wikipedia, the authors might gain good popularity so they would also be more focussed on writing topics at Knol.

Here is the official announcement of the project given in the Google Blog.
Things that are going to make the project more successful are - Author Bio, Article rating and reviews, comments on the article, questions and answers section in the end.

What’s your say on this project of Google?