Charles Bukowski - American author

Similar to a wikipedia entry, but not anonymously authored. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, as I can only assume that Google will tend to give preferential search result ranking to their "knol"s (ranking them above corresponding wikipedia entries? - ha).

The other major improvement over wikipedia is that real world users can rank the article's relevance or usefulness. Interesting stuff.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html

http://www.google.com/help/knol_screenshot.html