There has been a lot of talk about Google’s recently announced Knol project on the web over the last week or so, but up till now we haven’t felt the need to add anything. However a piece in today’s Guardian Technology made an assumption that I though was worth challenging.

In the piece Charles Arthur sets out the (pretty reasonable) argument that Google is essentially annoyed that it can’t make any money from Wikipedia and so has launched Knol to rectify this.

[Google] can’t serve adverts on Wikipedia, and it makes its money from adverts, and since it can’t buy Wikipedia (or doesn’t want to try) there isn’t much else to do but try to compete.

After discussing the relative pros & cons of both services he then comes to the conclusion that Wikipedia is in no danger because:

If really good knols appear, Wikipedia will feed off them and even produce meta-versions of multiple knols on the same topic. And that will mean that it will remain dominant. Google may have met its match.

What this ignores of course is why Wikipedia is so dominant, which is the fact that it ranks #1 on Google for an immense number of searches. And the reason for that is not because of its inherent quality, but because Wikipedia has such an immense number of inbound links pointed at it that even some of the worst pages can rank highly against very competitive search phrases.

Now the arrival of Knol (when it does actually arrive, because at the moment it is just a blog post & a screen grab) doesn’t mean that this will automatically change: that Knol will suddenly start ranking higher or that Wikipedia will suddenly start losing links. However there is a reasonable chance that some sort of levelling may occur.

The reason I say this is twofold. Firstly, just as Wikipedia may feed off of Knol, so may the reverse occur. As Michael Arrington of TechCrunch puts it:

Very soon we are going to see a lot of Wikipedia content moving wholesale to Knol. Wikipedia content is basically free to use, redistribute, copy, whatever, under the GNU license.

Anyone writing for Knol is likely to at least peruse Wikipedia content before publishing. And if they see anything good, they are at liberty to simply lift and copy it over to Knol, and get a adsense check for their time. #

So, in a way, Google has found a way to monetize Wikipedia content after all.

And the other factor that could come into play would be if Google tweaked its algorithm in a way which might reverse Wikipedia’s dominance of the search results. They could do this simply by increasing the importance of links to an actual page rather than to a domain; Rand at SEOmoz has described the way that links to a domain can allow pages with relatively few direct links to rank as being akin to ‘the rising tide [which] lifts all ships’.

So if Google simply ‘insisted’ that an individual page had to have a relatively large number of good quality links in order to rank, then a large number of Wikipedia pages might start to drop out of the rankings. And by simply showing Knol results in something akin to the recently discarded OneBox results, they could start to pick up links all of their own.

Now Google have launched products in the past to great fanfare, only for them to come to nothing, and it may well be the same with Knol. But it is definitely worth bearing in mind that Wikipedia’s dominance has, to a large extent, been built on Google and if anyone will be able to damage that dominance, it’s likely to be Google.

UPDATE: Further to Jack’s comment below I thought it would be worth quoting the section of the GNU that TechCrunch reference with regards to their belief that people may use Wikipedia to populate Google Knol:

All text in Wikipedia is covered by GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), a copyleft license permitting the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content while authors retain copyright of their work.

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