I like the idea of a Sifter project, and it would be a necessary prerequisite for a future publication of Wikipedia in paper form, if anybody ever wished to do such a thing. It also might be an indication to people that they can treat the articles like "real" encyclopedia articles, and do things like cite them in papers, whereas in the current state of Wikipedia everything always has to be taken with a grain of salt (even a Sifter-approved article would have to be taken skeptically of course, but not quite as skeptically).
-Mark