Google Knol: An online collaboration too / moderated encyclopaedia

Google has launched an online encyclopaedia to take on Wikipedia called “Knol” centered around authors, which stands for unit of knowledge, allows internet users to write articles on their own areas of expertise. Knol was in private beta since 2007, and it has much more in common with Squidoo and HubPages than with Wikipedia.

Knol is termed as “moderated collaboration.” With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it!

When you log-in within your Google account to write an article on a subject you’re familiar with, you’ll use the kind of live-layout editor typical for Google and much easier to use than Wikipedia’s editor. For every article you can also choose your licensing, your collaboration, and your advertising model. For instance, you can connect an article to your AdSense account – this triggers a verification process.

You can pick a license; either a Creative Commons Attribution license, or a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial license, or the old-style “all rights reserved.”

And for collaboration, you can choose between any of the three: —open collaboration (any Knol user can edit the article), moderate collaboration (any Knol user can suggest changes to the article - enabled by default), closed collaboration (only the co-authors can edit the article).

Examples: How to Backpack, Buttermilk Pancakes, Type 1 Diabetes, A Distributed Document Repository.

Google Knol | Guidelines