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The Encarta and (I believe) World Book entries on "Fractal" were written by Benoit Mandelbrot. It's actually quite common for experts to write entries for an encyclopedia.

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Benoit Mandelbrot is famous because he published in venues like _Science_, not because an encyclopedia commissioned him to write an article or two.

I'm not saying experts can't write encyclopedia articles; I'm saying, credible experts don't use them as venues for research.

You are missing the point. Identifying an expert and asking them to write the article is exactly what traditional encyclopedia's do, while wikipedia actively discourages this.

That's not true. Wikipedia does not have a policy of discouraging experts from writing there. I've personally said (a couple times here) that experts shouldn't write Wikipedia articles, because it is a waste of their time. But they are clearly welcome to do so.

The only thing they're not welcome to do is to cite their own expertise instead of actual sources.

But in this story, the author did cite actual sources but was still reverted by page-watchers.

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