* disclaimer: I have worked with Squidoo in the past, and still have a couple of lenses there. I'm not taking a position on which is better - just pointing out a better comparison.
I think this flies in the face of many things that made Wikipedia a success.
Not to mention my first instinct was to visit knol.com, the website of a Dutch company who manufactures something resembling a crippled R2D2 using a walker.
I vote against this project as a serious rival for Wikipedia but only time will tell.
The fact that Google didn't buy Knol.com is sort of odd, agreed.
I don't think this can compete against Wikipedia. It can, however, serve as a supplement - it doesn't have the disadvantage of tyrannical, half-crazed admins. That makes it much freer than Wikipedia, in a sense, and that'll give it an advantage in quantity, if not quality.
I hope it succeeds, wikipedia is so full of wrong, but verifiable, information that it's hard to use it. (ColdFusion, UFO's, and the Singularity, are wonderful examples of wrong, but verifiable.)