The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion is run­ning a new piece (where I hap­pen to get a small blurb) on Google’s Knol, ask­ing what it will mean for stu­dents and pro­fes­sors. But it also deals, at least indi­rect­ly, with anoth­er ques­tion: Is Knol real­ly intend­ed to com­pete with Wikipedia?

When the con­tent ini­tia­tive was first announced, many assumed that this was Google’s way of try­ing to dis­place Wikipedia, whose links appear first in Google search results 25% of the time. But the com­pa­ny has since made it clear that they’re not try­ing to offer anoth­er ency­clo­pe­dia. Rather, they’re sim­ply offer­ing a plat­form for experts to write about what­ev­er they know. That could include entries on Ratio­nal­ism, the stuff you’d expect to find in a tra­di­tion­al ency­clo­pe­dia. But it also includes entries on how to orga­nize your home in 15 min­utes or less, or thoughts on whether peo­ple real­ly go to heav­en when they die. You can browse the range of entries here.

This approach makes Knol at once more expan­sive than Wikipedia and more dif­fi­cult to get your arms around. By lack­ing a focus, Knol is a lit­tle slip­pery. As a read­er, you’re not sure what you’ll get at Knol (aca­d­e­m­ic con­tent? recipes? how-to arti­cles? med­ical infor­ma­tion?). And, as a poten­tial writer, you’re not sure what kind of larg­er body of infor­ma­tion you’re con­tribut­ing to — some­thing that seems impor­tant for inspir­ing mass col­lab­o­ra­tion. This is not to say that Knol won’t yield a good amount of use­ful con­tent. It prob­a­bly will. But will it all hang togeth­er, and will it all con­tribute to anoth­er jug­ger­naut Google prod­uct? Well, I’m less sure about that. If you dis­agree, feel free to make your case in the com­ments below.