Google launches rival to Wikipedia

A knol is what Google says is a unit of knowledge and its new Knol site is a repository for authoritative articles about specific topics – Google’s effort to take some of the punch from sites like Wikipedia and cash in on the collaborative wiki content trend.

And there’s greed as a motive – users can actually make money by choosing to display Google Adsense adverts with their article.

Instead of the community authorship of Wikipedia, Knol gives bylines, inviting people to write about their areas of expertise. “We are deeply convinced that authorship — knowing who wrote what — helps readers trust the content,” said Cedric DuPont, product manager for Knol.

Users register and get publishing tools similar to a blog page. It plans to rank articles by popularity, hopefully spurring competition. You can choose to allow moderated collaboration to your article, giving you, in effect, editor status in deciding whether an interloper should be alowed to apend your work.

A quick check of the beta knols – as it calls the articles – finds lots of health-related and how-to articles. Check it out at knol.google.com.