Google has released recently (23rd July) a competitor to Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/) called Knol (http://knol.google.com/). I think it will be interesting to follow up on the competition between the two, both aiming to "rule over knowledge of man kind".
I'll begin my comparison between them with a few dry facts. I will let you be the judges (I will write my opinion at a later post)
Is it free?
- Wikipedia is free and ad-free. There is no intent to gain financial profit from this project.
- Knol is free but not ad-free. The main incentive to write in Knol is that you might get money from your published work by adding ads.
Anonymous vs. credit
- You can write anonymously in Wikipedia. The articles themselves are anonymous/credit less.
- I am not sure you can write anonymously in knol - it does ask for your user name when you try to create a new article. The articles themselves are with credits - you can see exactly who wrote them. This is part of the idea of being able to get some profit out of this.
Editing articles
- In Wikipedia, anyone can edit an existing article, fixing any mistakes or enhancing any part.
- Knol does not let you edit work that you have not published yourself.
For now I will leave you with an interesting comparison between both knowledge bases on the word "genesis". I know it is not a fair comparison, since knol was just released, but it is still a bit amusing to see the difference:
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