Online Wisdom Coming in a New Flavour?

This article mentions that Wikipedia has become one of the most dependable and trustworthy sources of information. A new project by Google is also detailed (knol project) which can also become a very reliable source of information.

Wikipedia has the honor of becoming one of the most reliable information sources both offline or online. A part of their huge success is accredited to the esteemed position Wikipedia has enjoyed tremendously at Google, usually in the leading couple of listings for highly competitive and common terminologies.

Google recently announced a new project that has the potential to become even more famous as a source of reliable information. At present, this project is nicknamed the “knol project”. (You can find out more about it here).

Knol is a one of its kind information experiment in the way that it will create a trustworthy article regarding any topic and then allow comments and feedback (opinions people have about the article) from the community. I am not crystal clear on how Google will determine the initial authority to pen down these articles. However, if I were to guess, I would say that the academic orientation of Google will play a role here and prior to allowing individuals to post on topics, they will very suitably need some form of literary, academic or business credential (as proof) from the said individual.

As a judge of quality, the web has only started to scratch the community’s power. Digg (a social networking site that features news stories that are user-submitted) utilizes voting, whereas Wikipedia makes use of a group editing model. It appears that knol will allow people to add content to the existing article (but not modify anything in it) and it will offer voting as well to the community.

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