Interesting approach here. They seem to be taking a sort of Darwinian blog approach to encyclopedia generation. Let everyone make their own "knols" and inevitably people will end up creating multiple knols on the same topics. The system lets people submit comments, edits, and review each other's work. I assume that what will happen is that those knols which develop a community connected/invested will soon be most prominent in the search results (ie, they win).

Contrast this with some of the other approaches to expert, assured knowledge. Other's have already mentioned Citzendium. I'll mention Scholarpedia, a system based on the peer-review process as used in academic journals. However that process is expanded in two ways:

1. Authors of articles are typically picked by election, allowing the community to pick someone most qualified, rather than the first one to squat on the topic.

2. After authors are no longer willing to curate (ie, moderate the corrections & additions submitted by anyone) the baton is automatically passed on to the person who has been most active in editing that particular article