I was doing some research to prepare for my big debut as a keynote speaker and came across this announcement about KNOL, which at first glance looks like another of Google's attempts at wikidelic stuff. But I looked closer, and saw that it's actually much different, closer to Sanger's vision than Jimbo's:

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted.

The wiki stuff comes in after the article is posted. People will be able to do a variety of things to the knoll, including adding and editing content. It looks as though the authors may have control over some of this; I couldn't quite figure out. Google assures us that they'll use their powers of "ranking websites" to give the best knolls a push. They also encourage competing entries on the same subject, something Wikipedia forbids.

It's probably worth keeping an eye on. :)