Knol facts for kids
|
Type of site
|
Reference |
|---|---|
| Dissolved | May 1, 2012 |
| Owner | |
| Created by | |
| Website | knol.google.com (offline) |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Yes |
| Launched | July 23, 2008 |
| Current status | Closed |
Knol was a Google project that aimed to include user-written articles on a range of topics. Lower-case, the term knol, which Google defined as a "unit of knowledge", referred to an article in the project.
The project was led by Udi Manber, a Google vice president of engineering. It was announced on December 13, 2007, and was opened in beta version on July 23, 2008, with a few hundred articles, mostly in the health and medical field. The project was closed on April 30, 2012, and all content was deleted by October 1, 2012.
The Internet Archive has snapshots of knol archived between July 2008 and May 2012.
Knol was described both as a rival to encyclopedia sites such as Wikipedia, Citizendium, and Scholarpedia and as a complement to Wikipedia, offering a different format that addressed many of Wikipedia's shortcomings.
Any contributor could create and own new Knol articles, and there could be multiple articles on the same topic with each written by a different author.
Authors could also choose to include ads from Google's AdSense on their pages. This profit-sharing was criticized as self-promotion or spam.
See also
In Spanish: Knol para niños
