Sean Barrett wrote:
A free encyclopedia that only credentialled experts could edit was tried: [[Nupedia]]. "Before it ceased operating, Nupedia produced 24 articles that completed its review process (three articles also existed in two versions of different lengths), and 74 more articles were in progress."
To be fair, those articles were pretty good - featured-article quality. Used to run across them in WP from time to time. Might be interesting to find them and review edit histories, see if they've gotten better or worse.
One of the things that's not much noticed about traditional "expert-written" encyclopedias that they are also highly uneven in quality. The really good entries are surrounded by a dozen hack jobs that never get improved from one edition to the next. Compare the more-obscure entries of modern EB to 1911 EB, in many cases the text has only seen light editing in nearly a century...
Stan