I think there is a 'market' for this, for people looking for a more authoritative source with an attributable author this looks more suitable than Wikipedia.Of course I love Wiki, and like many use it during assignments or at work but this could be a great complement.

Of course many Wikipedia articles are found through Google search and are usually high up the results list. Wonder if that might change.

Once money gets involved, intellectual property issues soon follow.

Suppose I take a popular Wikipedia article, rewrite it, and supply it on google -- and profit from the ads. Or articles from obscure journals. Or somebody else's PhD thesis. Do a really good job, and it's legit; just do a paraphrase, and maybe not.

Now, there's a lot of established case law as to what constitutes an "original work" but it still comes down to a judge's interpretation, which tends to come after a lot of expensive legal activity. Google has the deep pockets, of course, but they might be tempted to just pay such people to go away. And Google has to vet the articles (or pay other authorities in the field to do so), looking for that kind of thing in the first place, or they'll really be liable.

I'm quite sure google has better, and better-informed, minds than mine looking at this, but it does raise a host of issues that Wikipedia doesn't have to contend with (in addition to all the other ones it does, such as perceived bias).

Long overdue. This can only improve knowledge and the competition to gather it, right? We all win. right?

One problem with this is the collaborative nature of wikipedia, which is what has made it so successful. The best articles are often the result of many hands. There are authorities on any given topic, sure, but even they may not know the whole story. Or they may just have better things to do (especially when it comes to keeping a topic obsessively up to date like wikipedia generally is). The Wiki model allows someone to write most of a topic, and have others flesh it out, adding obscure details an authority doesn't find interesting, or introductory information that experts would just assume. It's also possible for someone to rewrite a topic to make it a better / easier read; not all authorities are great writers, and good writers can recast bad prose without damaging any of the facts.

If google limits each topic to a single author, they will miss out on this aspect. And if they don't, how do they apportion the ad revenue? It looks like Google expects there to be "competing" topics by different authors in such cases, but that doesn't necessarily solve the problem: each topic may have its strengths, which means now you have to read two (or more) topics and try to sort out the differences. But that puts the onus on the reader, who by definition is less equipped to do this than the authors. By requiring collaboration on a single topic, Wikipedia forces this filtering and synthesis to be done by the experts, not the reader.

Could be useful in areas where expertise is required e.g. anything medical.

Overall though I'm generally happy with Wikipedia, though admittedly they are also exclusively for something computer related, specificity linux related, and seems to be higher quality over all than some of the other Wikipedia articles I've come across.

WOAH - here's something that should be mentioned and covered:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/13/wikimedia_coo_convicted_felon/

If independently verified...all of Wikipedia's dirty laundry is going to hit the fan. HARD.

I think this sounds like a great idea. It creates a financial incentive for authors to create *useful* articles. Or at least popular articles. It will be very interesting to see what comes from this.

A group of Wikipedia editors could take control of an article by reverting opposing edits using NPOV as an excuse and bait others to violate the three-revert-rule. Some even move your discussion from the discussion page of an article. Hopefully, "knol" would have a solution for this.

http://images.google.com/images?q=gnoll

?

;)