Successful crowdsourcing is about identifying a community with passion that can be channeled into useful work. Hats off to Rap Genius to nailing this for annotations.
Unfortunately when they (Quora) started to try to scale new verticals the growth rate was significantly reduced and panic set in on both the leadership front as well as the investment front. The act of debating is what drives annotation, not the act of annotating itself.
I'm not saying that the can't do it, in-fact they seem like some ballin' ass hustlers, but they have in fact not yet solidified a product to market fit that can scale universally.
Quora on the other hand has been pursuing the one-size-fits-all approach which conflicts with the diversity that comes with increasing popularity.