Google Wikipedia rival Knol is live

Google's Wikipedia competitor, Knol, was opened to the public on Wednesday morning.

So-called knols are articles about specific topics written by experts on that subject.

Google is partnering with The New Yorker magazine to allow any author to add a cartoon from the magazine to their knol. Knol authors can run ads with them, as well, and receive a cut of the revenue from Google.

What makes Knol different from Wikipedia is that every knol will have an author, or group of authors, whose name is prominent.

Google wants to rank entries by popularity to encourage competition. For example, the first knol on "Type 1 Diabetes" is by Anne Peters, director of the University of Southern California's Clinical Diabetes Programs.

As other writers publish on diabetes, Google plans to rank related pages according to user ratings, reviews and how often people refer to specific pages, DuPont said.

Knol focuses on individual authors or groups of authors in contrast to Wikipedia's subject entries, which are updated by users and edited behind the scenes.

Around 300,000 wikipedia pages don't meet it's quality standards

Wikipedia is great. But if you use Google you will be able to find out that around 300,000 pages have this tag "This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards." ie. these pages are not of much use.

Wikipedia can tackle this issue only by paying writers. But, in order, to do so they will have to sell advertising apace to generate revenues. Advertising is unmentionable in Wikipedia, so it will be long before these pages are fixed.

How wikipedia can use advertising but remain non profit and neutral

Wikipedia has long being against advertisement on it's sites. It depends on users to donate. Users who are mostly below 16 years doing their homework. Wikipedia hardly manages to get any donation from users but some corporate samaritans do help. Instead, they could just start selling advertisement and use the required money for survival and donate the rest to charity. And as for neutrality they can avoid contextual ads.
They could just put one small image ad on every page of one company. Like only At&t ads on every page regardless of content. It can be pay per day basis. Just imagine how much big companies will pay to have their ads on every page of wikipedia even or a day considering wikipedia's traffic.

Here are few of the solutions which was proposed
* Ads on articles pages is the most widely rejected solution, though there are a few supporters
* An opt-in system. Readers will have the opportunity to say "yes, I want advertisement". This would likely require the reader to be identified by an account, and to login. Most readers are unlikely to have an account, so it is not clear this solution would bring much money.
* An opt-out system. Readers will have the ads by default, but can request not to have the ads displayed. Most editors also feel this solution intrusive and it is unlikely to be retained
* Advertisment on search pages. This may be the least controversial solution, as it can not be said to damage our concept of neutrality, and might on the contrary bring a benefit to the reader. It has not been approved though.

Google might end up buying Wikipedia

In it's Official Google Blog: Encouraging people to contribute knowledge Google announced that it is going to launch service similar to Wikipedia. But I think it might not succeed. Remember Google Video, which was launched to rival the already popular YouTube. It flopped and Google, to enter video sharing business, had to buy YouTube. I foresee similar fate again for Google. It might buy Wikipedia to get in to the business of knowledge sharing.
To prevent this the founders of Wikipedia will have to put Ads on it's site.