There are many things about this project that don't make any sense, as others have commented; it is not a wiki, does not compete with Wikipedia, seems to stand alone from other Google products in terms of design and yet they still haven't changed the name even after the owner of knol.com refused to sell.
One of the things that I like about Wikipedia is that I can just hand craft a /wiki/Title URL - Knol's URLs are obfuscated behind strange ID's and author's names. Do they not consider these things?
On a similar topic, I'll never understand why they decided to shelve Google Answers - there could have been a great synergy between that community and a wiki.
Knol will fail simply because it does not beat Wikipedia in any respect.
Was this born from a 20% side project by any chance? I can imagine some executive sitting behind his desk thinking "we need to buy wikipedia, but we can't.. so anyway, this knol thing looks close enough.. let's promote it to production".