Google's Wikipedia Copy with Attribution

Given time, citations to Knol may be more acceptable to college professors than Wikipedia. Competition is usually good for any product, so perhaps both will be improved over time.

Google Offers Knol, a Wikipedia Copy with Attribution - Yahoo! News:
"On Wednesday Google took the lid off a new product called Knol. The search-engine giant first announced it was testing the product in December. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects.
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"With Knol, we are introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call moderated collaboration," Dupont and McNally wrote. "With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it!"

Knol includes community tools for interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate or write a review of a knol. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from Google's AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share.
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Experts can access the new site at knol.google.com."