The Google Blog has announced a new product called "knol":

Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

It sounds fascinating and (to me, anyway) reads like a clear call to arms to create a competing service to Wikipedia, with several really awesome additions. It also allows contributors to put ads on their content and generate revenue from it.

One of the frequent (and many) criticisms of Wikipedia is the fact that anyone can write authoritatively on any subject without any real credentials, expertise, or (let's face it) understanding about what they're writing about. From Google's example knol it looks like they've clearly identified this as a major deal, and the association between an individual knol and the author will be a big part of this new service, providing users with great ability to determine if an article is written by an expert on the subject.