Fizzics

I’ve noticed a lot of bloggers making comment on Google’s launch of their knowledge service “knol” this week.  There’s a lot of chatter on how move this is an assault on Wikipedia (here, here & here for example) but is it really?    
There are people who love  Wikipedia and there are others who, perhaps rightly, question the accuracy of the information, agenda of the contributors or the authority of the volunteers who do the editing.  With Knol, Google gets away from these arguments by having pages (knols) written by experts in that subject.   
Google has invited people it considers experts to contribute some knols for their beta phase.  These people will receive a 50% cut of advertising revenue from their own pages and a further element of competition exists in that Google anticipates more than one knol on a subject.  It looks as if authors can expect to go head to head with rival experts in terms of page rank, page views and advertising revenue but I’m not sure which of these is the best indicator of quality from our perspective.  Which knol page meets the need that drove us to the web for inforamtion in the first place? 
I have another problem with the knol idea.  In terms of learning it’s a backward step.  A move that I see more as an attack on Encyclopedia Britannica than Wikipedia.  The knol concept takes an expert who delivers content to the reader.  It’s essentially a traditional education model, the very model that Wikipedia is trying to break.  In education-speak, we have knol handing out information to passive learners while Wikipedia encourages active learning and participation – the Holy Grail of current education policy.

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