Some people hailed the new Google Knol as an alternative for Wikipedia, but it’s not just for Wikipedia: it’s written chaotically by random people: both people holding PhDs and people who don’t know much about the subject. Knol appears to be more like the Web itself, but completely under the control of Google.
Every big corporation wants captive customers, and Google is afraid that its customers would be able to escape. People would search less on google and instead head off to Wikipedia for information, to Web 2.0 sites when wanting to browse something interesting and to their favourite shopping portal when in need to buy something. Knol is the solution, as Google holds the content on its servers and it can monetize it with adsense.
Wikipedia, because of its wealth of information, was indeed seen as a threat for Google, but they can’t do anything to their Search engine results to penalize Wikipedia somehow, because that would result in lower quality results overall and that could affect its market place. On many topics, the only reasonable article on this is the Wikipedia’s and Google is surely wishing it would be able to monetize it.
Knol allows, due to the way the Google algorithms work, that everyone can place in front in the google results with an article, so that they’ll be able to “steal” a part of Wikipedia’s traffic and control and monetize it.
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