Is Google Knol failing?
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I understand the nature of a company like Google is to cast your net wide, devote a small amount of resources to a bunch of products and hope some of them take off. That's what Knol is part of and that's fine. Google's mistake has been not improving or shutting it down before it became an embarrassment.
Given that I consider articles like this to be exactly the level of mockery they deserve.
Yes. But there was probably too much corporate inertia to shut it down within forty-eight hours after it was opened to public posting, by which time it was a huge embarrassment.
Wikipedia is both great and terrible. It both "very unreliable" and about as reliable as one gets in any first blush look at given subject. Certainly, to many experts it is an embarrassment and, worse, a threat. But that's often as not because even expert opinion is divided in many fields and Wikipedia doesn't prevent well supported dissident opinion from being entirely suppressed. Certainly, no should quote Wikipedia in print without further research but it's a great place to start that research.
Knol has ~300,000 articles in total, many of which are instructional on specific subtopics. Wikipedia has 3 million articles in English on every topic. Not only is Wikipedia much bigger, it also has a more specific focus (creating an encyclopedia).