“ Wikipedia, a non-profit, has stubbornly resisted any efforts to monetize its pages. Google would kill to supply ads to Wikipedia. Barring that, competing with them makes a lot of sense. Google needs to grow revenue to support their valuation. And for that, they need ad inventory. It wasn’t surprising when Google started hosting news directly and allowing comments (that = page views). So the idea of them hosting a knowledge base shouldn’t be surprising, either.
Source:
A Few Thoughts On Google Knol (thanks Sox)
The Knol project is going to fail. Google is an amazing tech company, but they don’t understand how to foster communities like Wikipedia. If all they wanted was AdSense inventory, they would have been better off creating a Wikipedia mirror hosted on Google.com and surround the articles with ads. I’m actually surprised that all the search engines haven’t licenced copies of Wikipedia. Why recreate Wikipedia when that content can be hosted on your own site with your own ads for free under the GNU license?
