In December of 2007, Google announced their plan to create pages called, “knols”. These pages will be articles of user-generated content that will appear at the top of the search page, for people who want a general idea of their search term. This is said to be Google’s plan to compete with Wikipedia.

The biggest difference between knols and wikis is that knols will be sourceable. Each knol will have one author and in order to edit/contribute to the page one must get permission from the author.

The appeal of this is that readers will know exactly who created the user-generated content. The potential downside? Google is going to allow more than one page for each topic. Having multiple articles per subject will allow each author to focus on his/her own area of expertise and to give an opinion on the topic.

Perhaps a better way to look at this is to realize the knols format makes them so that they are really not at all comparable to wikis. Reading knols will be more like reading op-eds, factual but opinionated. The reader will gain information from a reliable source, but will need to realize that the source is not necessarily neutral.