The Knights Templar ... just because this post needed a picture.

Reading this article over at Wired made me pause for a moment; I remember hearing about Knol ages ago, and sort of assumed it had quietly debuted to a lukewarm reception already.  But I guess not, since today marks the Official Launch of Knol.

I won’t bother describing Knol beyond a summary of the Wired article: basically, Knol is a collection of user-generated non-fiction (?) content, but unlike Wikipedia, its works are single-author and not anonymous.  Presumably, this is intented to encourage lots of respectable scholarly papers on all sorts of arcane subjects, from the mating rituals of the wookie to the difficulties of proper dilithium storage.  And instead of being the battleground for ideologies in search of neutral common ground, Knol’s articles will be unabashedly biased.

I think the reason I didn’t reference Knol directly in my post about the other content Google is producing is because I considered it more an act of aggregation; they’re not financing original material so much as assembling a body of user-generated articles.  But that somewhat belies the economic truth: Knol will, at least in theory, pay the authors.  It still isn’t financing, per se, but profit-sharing; a fraction of the AdSense revenue will go to authors who are prepared to accept it.

Unlike Wikipedia, which is more or less uniformly unreliable because it’s the product of literally thousands of authors, most of them in disagreement, Knol will at least introduce a sense of accountability to the authors, and, resultingly, more variant unreliability.  The articles will be as accurate or inaccurate as the individual authors, not the crowd.  Is this better or worse?  Well, that depends … User-generated content has actually proven to be of surpringly high quality (forgetting, for a moment, the not-uncommon acts of cybervandalism Wikipedia experiences); it seems that self-regulation reinforces the good and mitigates the bad, and the overall quality, while never totally rigorous, tends to rise as high as the best minds, rather than the opposite.  Knol, on the other hand, will be much more hit-and-miss.  You can count on the hordes at Wikipedia to keep the page on the Knights Templar relatively down-to-earth (at least the legends are clearly identified as such), but no such constraints will be placed on the authors over at Knol.  Knol will give us access to authoritative works written by the authorities themselves — which is great — but also to lots and lots of crackpotism.  Google is relying on the usual filtering mechanisms (a ratings system, and the efficacy of search algorithms) to differentiate the two.  Whether this works or not remains to be seen.  My guess is Knol will either be huge, forming a nice complement to Wikipedia, or it will become a resource for the obscurest of technical knowledge — a place for instructions on how to write matching algorithms for isolating nonidentical strings using C++, for example — in other words, a place to stick things that are useful to a very few people, and which are otherwise lacking a place to stick ’em.

In any case, it’s too early to tell.  Knol doesn’t even have an entry for the Knights Templar.  Yet.  But I’d expect to see links to Knol articles popping up in your Google search results relatively soon.