What Google's New Encyclopedia Means for Students and Professors

By ANDREA L. FOSTER

When college students begin researching Margaret Mead, Einstein's theory of relativity, Marxism, or any other weighty topic, their first stop is often Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia created by the masses.

So in July, when Google unveiled Knol, another Web-based collection of user-generated articles that the company calls "authoritative," the question for faculty members — many of whom are not fond of Wikipedia as a research tool — was whether students might