Wikipedia is a wild success and an utter failure

The problem with Wikipedia -- one that stems from, and compounds, all of the problems mentioned in this piece -- is that the wilderness has been cleared. The fun, groundbreaking contribution work is done. Much of -- if not most of -- the big, foundational, crystallized knowledge base on the site has been written. All that remains now are small(er) updates to limited subfields, rote listmaking, current events updates (never Wikipedia's strong suit in the first place), and editing. Plenty of editing.

None of those things is inherently fun for most people. Your average internet user -- someone who would have loved contributing a fresh article ten years ago -- probably has little desire to devote an appreciable amount of time to curating and categorizing other people's work. But yet, there's a vocal minority of users who do enjoy such things, and those are the "procedural whackjobs" of which you speak.

Call this the rise of the Editorial Class. Wikipedia is now dominated by a small percentage of editors, who revert new work by contributors, and whose arcane rules, lists, procedures, politics, and supercillious disdain make contributing fresh material more a labor than a labor of love. And, lest we think this is noble work put forth by self-sacrificing custodians of knowledge, let me say that my encounters with such people have rarely left an impression of maturity, or even competence. No, for a lot of them, it's a petty power trip. (To wit: one of my articles -- thoroughly researched and painstakingly written -- was eventually lobbied for deletion, successfully, by a little clique of editors calling itself the "Counter Vandalism Unit." As far as I could tell, this is a group of grown-ass adults playing "24" dress-up on Wikipedia, complete with their own badge-like logo, who sadly wield a decent amount of editorial control over the site).

On the flipside, as you point out, some of this works in Wikipedia's favor. More timely sources of knowledge, like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, search engines, etc., can beat out Wikipedia's relatively antiquated categorization systems and contribution mechanics fairly handily. But, by and large, most people contributing "content" or "information" through such channels are not really cognizant that that's what they're doing (witness the big uproar over Facebook's data collection; people are inherently surprised that they've been contributing data to any sort of repository of such). Rarely does someone tweet, or post an FB status update, thinking he's contributing to the grand collection of all human knowledge. So the sum total of all the knowledge-data generated outside of Wikipedia, more current and possibly even more interesting though it may be, is still a lot more flab than muscle. That will change eventually, as data mining and contextualization technologies improve. For the time being, however, the lack of an organizing principle similar to Wikipedia's, outside of Wikipedia, will keep Wikipedia relevant. Not indefinitely, but for quite a few years to come.

If there's one piece of framework Wikipedia needs, it's a centralized database for citations. That database should contain every book, article, poem, etc. that's cited in any Wikipedia article, and I should be able to re-cite an entry with a single number or tag...without having to re-enter the name of the darn publisher myself.

How much money would it take to make this happen?

The article doesn't mention the huge number of adolescents using twinkle (and other tools) to make very many changes very quickly.

Seeing editors being proud of the number of articles they've had deleted, or the number of reverts they've made, is pretty sickening.

Wikipedia's secret is that it manages to make the average contribution very slightly positive on average, then makes up the rest in volume. When everything is cumulative like that, the fact that the sum total of Wikipedia contributions do indeed contain a lot of crap doesn't matter, since "good - bad" still comes out quite positive.

It's a delicate balance, though.

The true achievement of Wikipedia is not in its content, but its groundwork. Every company should maintain its own internal and external wikis, even if only employees can access or modify them.

It simplifies distribution of documentation and files in a very user friendly way.

And let's face it. Whack jobs write books and news paper columns too. Wikipedia has a surprising amount in common with college text books.

To me, wikipedia is like a dog walking on its hind legs (as Samuel Johnson said of women preachers). The point isn't that it isn't done very well, the point is that it works at all.

If you'd asked me, at the start of the wikipedia project, whether it would ever grow to be a useful resource I'd have said "hell no, it'll just get taken over by idiots, bad content will drive out good, you can never put together a useful resource by collaborative editing, it's a pipe dream". And yet here we are, in a situation where wikipedia is actually a damn good resource on just about any subject of interest.

Almost all the people who complain about wikipedia are people who are attempting to edit it. And some of them may have a point... while others are attempting to insert stuff that doesn't fit the guidelines. But as long as you're using it in read-only mode, what's to complain about?

Wikipedia is Web 2.0. User generated content online, crowd sourced, the whole lot. However for sources, they only look at early 20th centuary tech, like newspapers or books. They don't value internet sources nearly as much.