2008/9/23 WJhonson@aol.com:
Knol is an online magazine -- multiple authors with bylines (credit), writing mostly individual articles *with some small input* and doing so to promote their business or themselves. That's not the reason d'etre of an encyclopedia. The next step for Knol is probably going to be the creation of sub-communities and cities built *on top of* the content. Some of us have already made baby-steps in that direction with indexes, but what we really need is categories and better userfication with projects and portals. Knol is only a few months old, but already it seems like a much more Randian approach to the underlying issue than Wikipedia. That is, each artist is allowed to fully express their art-form in their own way, and the best art rises to the top of the heap. That's the intent, it may not yet be the fact. It may never be. We'll see.
I'm really not convinced it's a good approach at all to the question: "what is useful to the reader?"
More pontifications: http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2008/08/27/forget-the-writers/
- d.