> Are you seriously suggesting that before the internet no one published or wrote about highly niche or uninteresting subjects? That you couldn't find mundane facts from history or nature written down somewhere?
Yes and no. I'm suggesting that before Wikipedia, no encyclopedia could have published an article about Jack Wade, Alaska, an incorporated community of probably < 100 people (I picked this place somewhat randomly off of google maps). If you put even one sentence about every town similar to that in an encyclopedia, you'd have an encyclopedia set that no one would be able to afford.
> What we'd then have is a social network of people competing for some kind of points or popularity, or to prove who was the most expert or most interested in the subject.
This really depends. For example, maybe I'm an American with a grandparent from Volosianka, Lviv Oblast, Ukraine (again, I picked this semi-randomly). Population is about 1500 today. There's probably a handful of people in the world who speak English and who have a particular interest in that town. Maybe my grandpa is from there and i'm looking to learn more about his life and i'd love to chat with someone else who knows more about the place. I think that there are a lot of articles on the long tail of wikipedia where there's probably only a few people in the world who care about the topic and if I'm one of them, I'd be interested in meeting with others. Obviously, there's plenty of topics where this isn't the case. I don't know how you'd implement this feature, because I don't think you want to turn wikipedia into a meeting room for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict [1]. But for these very very niche things, it could serve as an interesting meeting place.
[1] In other words, I am stating a problem here... not a solution