...if you google the word knol the wikepedia page for Knol appears before knol homepage..

Google has a few things they can use to help fine-tune the ranking of knols.

They can take notice of the star ratings. But, to my surprise, you can rate your own articles! So naturally mine are all five-star articles.

The ability to post reviews of other people's knols is woven tightly into the site, so I guess Google has some to use reviews as part of the ranking process. Well, it's not going to work. People aren't going to put as much effort into reviewing a cosntantly-evolving knol as they are into peer-reviewing a book or a journal. If you have a look at the existing "reviews", they're mostly indistinguishable from the comments.

Incidentallly, I don't see any evidence that the moderated collaboration is working yet (I've received none, and the one I submitted to Matt Cutts' biography is stamped "pending"). Has anyone got moderated collaboration working?

Many knols are ranking highly in Google's search results. I ascribe that to something I have observed on several sites. The search result placement is greatly affected by the rate of change of inbound links, not just by how many there are. So any page which is currently acquiring new links will do well, but once links to a page start to get deleted then that page will drop like a stone.

> Has anyone got moderated collaboration working?

One problem is there's no invite link so far for moderated collaboration. Right now, either you invite someone as author – meaning they can immediately go live with their changes, which may be fine except it will be *your* name in the URL etc. – or you invite someone as reviewer. Of course, you could just send around the URL and ask people to help out on an article. If someone does edit an article, there also doesn't seem to be any homepage alert taking you straight to review the changes... you seem to need to visit the article to see a note of the pending change in the context bar?

They definitely need to improve the way Knol communicates with authors. I'd like to get an email (or RSS feed) that alerts me when someone comments / reviews / or edits my Knols.

My debunking:

Google Knol Ranking – Google NOT favoring Knol (the way you think ...)
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001366.html

Everybody know, Wikipedia is one topic one articles by many authors, and Knol is one topic many articles each of which is written by one author only.

Is ranking really so important?

Neither Wikipedia nor Knol is bible, I may read both, probably focus more on Wikipedia as the content is under eagle eyes of readers.