While I was ranting some days ago about Wikipedia being completely bureaucratic and it being overly complex to get your knowledge, I’ve completely overseen the newest buzz around Google: Knol.

As soon as I realized that there might be an alternative to Wikipedia, I rushed over to knol.google.com and created my account, and was immediately frustrated by the lack of Articles. While knol surely has some nice improvements over Wikipedia (read WYSIWYG-Editor and better author-profiles), the real treasure of Wikipedia is the huge amount of topics and articles that cover about every aspect a normal user may need,and in some cases even for in depth studies, like for me it really helps me studying, where my professors didn’t explain that well. Sure, offering the authors some share of the revenue by letting them register their AdSense accounts with their knol accounts will push a lot of users towards knol, it will be a long while before they reach the level of completeness of Wikipedia.

Completeness is the next thing I have to criticise on knol: while it is possible for anybody to create his own knols (that’s what google calls it’s posts) on any topic, there is no guarantee that the topics will be covered in a neutral way and linked amongst them sufficiently, which is a major strength of Wikipedia on the other hand.

Also the knols will not be merged into one revised, corrected and there will be no generally acknowledged version which is the reference. It will just be a collection on articles floating around, like any other web page, and not a consolidated repository of knowledge, which should be the goal when trying to compete with Wikipedia.

Last but not least, I think, there will be a run to write only the most popular articles, with pretty useless content just to grab your attention, driving you to the authors page, to give him an impression on his Ads. Partly this can already be seen already, try searching for popular terms for wikipedia, music or knol.