Probably, they will claim some kind of copyrights over the digitalisation of the 1911 Encyclopedia.
That's not possible from the point of view of the copyright law as scanning is not a creative expression and the copyright of the original material has expired. The only thing which is possible is to claim copyright on additional markup, layout, presentation and additional graphics.
I think they fully deserve the legal copyright on their markup, layout, presentation and additional graphics :-)
More seriously: even if the quality of the scanned text will be improved, I do hope that nobody will whip together a script to suck the 1911 contents into Wikipedia wholesale. Every article needs to be read, checked for OCR mistakes, accuracy and outdated language, wikified and merged with whatever material we already have on the topic. Many technical articles will be useless because the terminology has changed. In mathematics for instance, it is next to impossible to read a paper that was written in the 19th century.
Axel