In an effort to organize human knowledge, Google unveiled its plans to build a new Web destination for those who wish to share their knowledge.

As Udi Manber, VP Engineer at Google, noted on The Official Google Blog, there are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it. But, Google considers that despite the fact we are leaving in a world where a blog is created at every 8 seconds, sharing the knowledge is not simply enough.

To address the problem, the Internet search giant decided to create Knol (a name derived from Knowledge), a project to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it.

Basically Knol is still a web page, but as Manber explained Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. “Writers only need to write; we'll do the rest,” wrote Manber.

As you can see, the resemblance with Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia is obvious, but there is a major difference.

While Wikipedia give no credit to the authors and is a common effort, Knol will be focused mainly on highlighting the authors.

“Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content,” Manber explained.

This way Google tries to improve the Wikipedia concept, which was often criticized because of the anonymity of the authors and the lack of accuracy of some articles, especially the ones that are addressing controversial issues.

Though various studies have revealed that despite its shortcomings, Wikipedia is better than other encyclopedias. 

For example in a recent research published earlier this week the German weekly magazine Stern said that the German version of Wikipedia is better than Germany's most prestigious commercial encyclopaedia, Brockhaus.de.

Stern engaged WIK, a research institute, to compare 50 randomly chosen articles from Wikipedia with 50 matching articles in the regularly updated online version, of the Brockhaus, Germany's equivalent of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Stern said the Wikipedia's average rating was 1.7 on a scale where 0 is best and 5 is worst. The Brockhaus rated 2.7 on the same measure.

The articles were assessed for accuracy, completeness, how up to date they were and how easy they were to read. In 43 matches, the Wikipedia article was judged the winner.

The German-language section of Wikipedia, numbering 673,000 articles, is the second biggest after the English version (2,115,000).

Also, unlike Wikipedia which has one page for every subject, Google’s Knol will have competing knols on the same subject, which could be a problem. In his post, Manber said

Google will not serve as an editor in any way and all editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. Google explained that users will be able to vote on a certain knol, to add commentaries, questions or additional content and even write reviews of the knol’s content.

Which of these will define the quality of a knol? The votes, the positive reviews, the number of page views? Whose responsibility will ultimately be to indicate a more relevant knol between two or more on the same subject?

What about the situation where a group of users decide to push a certain knol in front of another? Who will mediate a possible argument in this case?

Also, it’s still unclear whether an author will be able to approve or reject commentaries on his knoll. Google explained that the author would indeed be the only person deciding on the content of a certain knol, raising questions as to whether he/she will have to update it accordingly as a response to commentaries or correct possible errors.

The screenshot provided by Google indicates that an author is able to create more than one knol, but it is unclear whether they have to be in the same field or they can be spread among several fields of expertise.

Knol seems a project similar to another feature unveiled no to so long ago by Google for its News service. The people in the news are able to post comments on Google News, that appear along with the

At this point, Knol or whatever its final name will be, seems more like a Wikipedia alternative. It seems somewhat closer to a matrix of blogs or a kind of Digg.com with articles instead of links, than to an online encyclopaedia.

It will certainly be interesting to follow and see what the final concept of the project will turn out to be. Only then, one can actually see Knol work and evaluate its functionality and usefulness.