My experience is 100% to the contrary. By and large, we're not exclusively laypeople-- often we ARE the experts. Our math articles are written by math experts, our chemistry articles are written by chemists, our physics articles are written by physicists.
I think this is definitely true for articles in many of the hard sciences--maths, physics, chemistry, etc.--but many articles in the soft sciences are written only by hobbyists (for lack of a better word).
Plus, however difficult it is to understand articles, it's all the more difficult to try to write without any access to them, going exclusively by popular press accounts or abstracts. The results of having access are almost guaranteed to be better than the current situation, where some editors do have access, some editors don't have access, and so it's hard to double-check each other's work.
That's true, and you have a point here. If more editors had access to more, reliable content, they would be more able to check one another's work--provided they could understand the content in question.
My experience, however, is that everyone in academia LOVES Wikipedia-- a few old fogeys excepted perhaps. But people who like to learn love a giant encyclopedia that's free and has entries on everything.
Academia loves wikipedia-- they just don't like it when it's used for something it's not. A master carpenter loves having a power screwdriver for home repairs-- he just doesn't want to go to his jobsite and find his apprentices clumsily trying to use the blunt side of a power screwdriver to hammer nails.
I'm not sure you're correct here. Most of academia, in my experience, thinks Wikipedia is useful but flawed. _I_ think Wikipedia is useful but flawed. If Wikipedia didn't claim to be an encyclopedia, and thus claim to abide by all the relevant scholary content standards, it'd be welcomed, I think, in academia.
Cheers,
—Thomas Larsen