I was doing some editing on Wikipedia just now and had the following thoughts.
I don't think it's going to die down--ever. It's going to be active, and while it might die down somewhat, in fact, over the next many months, it's only going to get ''more'' :-) active.
I think this makes certain improvements, related to scalability, particularly crucial. One improvement that Jimmy has mentioned (maybe just to me--I forget where anyway) is to divide Wikipedia into several distinct categories. Perhaps "science, math, and philosophy," "social science," "applied arts and sciences," and "culture" (as per Nupedia) or perhaps something finer-grained. Then, whenever anyone saved a change, the change would be logged on one (or more) of *several* "recent changes" pages as indicated by the user. Then, if I was interested, then I could look at *only* those changes in the "culture" section.
If we don't do this--or come up with some other solution--we're going to have a serious problem of a "recent changes" page that just moves far too fast-and-furious for anyone to follow. It'll get very sloppy. The experience today and yesterday already bears this out.
Larry