Thanks to Rowan for a good summary! I think most Chinese speakers would agree that the difference between Simplified and Traditional Chinese is a minor one. On the other hand, a pure automatic translation between the two isn't likely to work, either, no matter how sophisticated the technique is. This is generally true for any machine translation, I think.
However, I think the wikipedia project provides a unique platform to tackle this problem, because there are lots of PEOPLE working together to provide quality content. The solution has been suggested several times here before: we use a program to do a simple automatic translation, using some sort of mapping tables. Since there are only minor difference between the variants, we can expect that in general there are not a lot of errors in the translation. We can then add a special wiki tag in the wikitext to specify how to correct those errors. Since most (if not all) articles in wikipedia is going to be edited again and again anyway, by many different people, to add content, correct errors, etc, why not put in the little bit of extra effort to correct these translation errors as well?
Thus I have started to implement this idea. I am running a test site at http://s87257573.onlinehome.us/wiki, to see how far this can go. It is not going to be easy to make the initial transition--lots of editing involved. But who says writing an encyclopedia should be easy? I welcome all to visit the test site, to try editing a few articles, and see the results. (There is a short English description there as well.)