Knol

Released by Google at the start of the year, knol is kind of like Wikipedia but with a few key differences; Google have no editorial power and the focus is on the authors of the content.
In their own words:
"A knol is an authoritative article about a specific topic."
so the website is supposedly a culmination of 'knowl-edge' written by authoritative and identifiable sources. Go check it out for yourself, here's the address:
knol.google.com
In my opinion, due to the focus on the author approach many people seem to approach it more like a blog than a space to input authoritative information. For example, I typed in 'America' to see what kinds of results it gave me: would it ask if I meant North America or South America, for example. The search results were a list similar to a Google search (surprise), the first result was 'Hunting in America' and the second was an entry titled 'America', which was the one I looked at. It is an entry written by a guy, John Smith, who is an web developer, which basically lists all the copyrights held which begin with 'America' or 'American' that he thinks summarizes America, gives a "snapshot of what America is".
And the site has been up since January.
I wonder if one of the problems with it is (ironically) a lack of authority, or an editor/s? Or maybe just a lack of input? I don't really understand how this will ever be able to be looked at as an authoritative source of information. I can understand the idea that an authoritative person will write an entry on a topic which they know about, but what about all the John Smiths who write entries which are merely musings? Doesn't that just undermine what they are trying to do?
It does, however, go far to exemplify how important it is for the success of Wikipedia that SO many people use it.

WikiScanner

Here is a great new tool created by a scholar named Virgil Griffith called Wiki Scanner. Basically it tracks the IPS addresses of anonymous edits on Wikipedia back to their registered authors (for public IPSs, like in government buildings etc). The results, as you can imagine, are quite revealing with the largest portion of edits done by factions of the American Military. It's not all quite so sinister, however, for example with one edit - which was traced back to the FBI headquarters - which was editing the lyrics for one of the songs sung in the musical episode of Buffy.

A very interesting tool which I will be looking closely at for my research into Wikipedia.

http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/

Go and check it out and see which corporations are editing Wikipedia pages in their favour.