A new user-generated encyclopedia that appears to threaten Wikipedia has just been released to the public under the name of Google Knol. Announced as a beta program in December 2007, Knol has gathered a few hundred articles and is now open to readers as well as writers.

However, unlike Wikipedia, articles cannot be edited by anyone; they will remain intact as written by their original authors. Furthermore, the encyclopedia is of a commercial nature, where writers get paid for their contribution depending on the number of page views shown. Google covers the cost and draws the profit from the AdSense ads placed in the articles. The ads are shown only if the author of the article chooses to.

Google said the Knol encyclopedia will not be given preferential treatment in the search results, however the Knol articles that are ranked highly will be given priority in the search results over the ones that received a lower rate.

Community feedback is accepted for all articles through articles and reviews. Many times these happen to be suggestions to the author on how to improve the article, since the author is the only one capable of making changes to the content.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said that it's too early to tell whether or not Knol will become a competitor to Wikipedia, because so far it looks "far more like a collaborative blogging platform" that could end up generating "a lot of opinion pieces rather than encyclopedic content."

Wikipedia articles themselves are viewed with skepticism, due to biased writing, vandalism and unprofessional writing. In 2007 a software developer wrote a program called WikiScanner that identified the authors of various Wikipedia edits, and revealed that the IP addresses of many large companies have been making changes on wikipedia entries concerning them or their competitors.

The Wikipedia already has an article on Google Knol.