Dear Google Knol,

After your recent announcement about opening Knol, I’m excited to share a few suggestions.

First of all, let me say how excited I am to see Knol come out to play. I’ve got nothing against Wikipedia, but just like there are different vendors for traditional book encyclopedias, I think it is great to have different sources for online encyclopedias. I think Knol will be a good supplement to Wikipedia.

I really like how you can choose different licenses for a knol, work and collaborate in groups, and receive adsense revenue for knols written. I’ve often wondered why I should spend time adding content to someone else’s site, when I could add content to my own and collect advertising revenue for it. With the revenue sharing model of Knol, I feel more comfortable putting forth efforts.

As a suggestion, I think you should also allow Google Analytics to be used on the pages to track traffic, similar to the way you allow Google Analytics to be used on Google Code projects.

One of the things I found confusing when I started using Google Knol is what the policies are for copying other sources, such as copying Wikipedia articles or copying other Google Knol articles. Although I’ve been able to figure this out, if you were to have a Google Groups discussion group for authors to discuss best practices, it would have been a valuable resource for beginning authors.

Finally, Google Knol is unique from Wikipedia in that it can allow multiple articles on the same topic. This can be a valuable incentive to allow more people practice writing articles. For example, I think Google should work with educational institutions, especially high schools, to provide opportunities for students to write knols for their school projects. Allowing high school students to write scholarly articles and reports which can then be peer reviewed online would be valuable preparation for collegiate studies.

Thank you for hosting Knol,
Jacob

BTW – From what I’ve been able to discover about copying articles, Wikipedia articles cannot be copied for use in Knol because Wikipedia articles are licensed under an license incompatible with Creative Commons licenses used by Knol. Knol articles can be copied with attribution, but if a knol uses the Creative Commons non-commercial license, then it cannot be copied to a knol displaying adsense. At least, that is how I read things.