Ed Poor wrote:
Is Wikipedia destined to be little more than an annotated collection of web links and bibliographical references? If so, I'm going to continue to lose interest in the project.
Oh, Ed, don't tempt me.... ;)
More seriously, I think Wikipedia is at a point where increasing the _number_ of articles is less important than improving their _quality_. I'm not sure what the best strategy is for doing this. One possibility might be to seek funding for the purpose of hiring some information specialists (such as librarians and/or or experts in various fields) to help with cataloging, organizing and editing. The model I'm thinking of here is OhMyNews, an online newspaper in South Korea. About 20% of its content is written by its staff, while the majority of articles are written by more than 10,000 other contributors who are paid small amounts of money for their work.
Has anyone considered the possibility of some kind of creative partnership with commercial encyclopedia companies? If IBM is getting into Linux these days, it's not inconceivable that World Book or Encyclopedia Britannica might develop an interest in getting involved with Wikipedia before things advance to the point where their own rationale for existence disappears.