For me, that’s where Wikipedia is likely to lead for some time, since Google have by their own admission said they won’t offer any editorial services.

Think of the number of times we reference a Wikipedia article by a section within it, rather than just the article itself.

Unless the writers are going to be disciplined enough to do that, and Google’s Knol’s support such things, they’re likely to suffer as points of authoritative reference…

But back to Wayne’s point. It’s all about content, isn’t it. For we three our online content is what we write on our blogs and other sites. For Google its content is made from the sites it indexes and makes available through searches. So I guess we could think of Knoll as either competing with its current content or just adding to it. For all the traffic that goes to Wikipedia a lot still goes to the other sites and will too with Knol. Knol articles will also link to other sites as Wikipedia does so those sites will get visitors. From a commerce perspective perhaps it all balances out. We just need to get the traffic to the sites no matter what route it takes to get there.

Aside from the commercial aspects I’m intrigued by the idea of a more user-friendly wiki-like information resource. I go through the history pages on Wikipedia sometimes and even with features like talk it can be really tricky to figure out what got changed when on an active page. I’d love to see a more intuitive interface to watching a page evolve. Our Case Wiki also uses the MediaWiki platform and it’s just kind of awkward. We have a fairly decent amount of content on it so far, but I think we’d have a lot more if it were more intuitive.

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