create an encyclopedia or database containing all the human knowledge. Of course this aim can never be reached, but it should be approximated
There is a difference between knowledge and information. Wikipedia contains too much information and too little knowledge. This results in attracting more and more people who think wikipedia is another good place to share information instead of knowledge, people who believe that their information is knowledge. In most cases it isn't.
To say it bluntly, the information contained in a "List of porn actors who died wearing a hobbit costume" isn't knowledge for 99.999999999% of the Wikipedia users. I agree that it might be knowledge for 0.000000001% if they are looking for that particular kind of information. However, if Wikipedia does contain that information to fulfill the needs of that little amount of users, that specific information is noise for the vast majority. Since there are no retrieval methods to sort out relevant from irrelevant information, the noise is there. (No, google does not work.)
Knowledge is information that rests if everything unneeded *is sorted out*. Forgetting information is a very important thing in creating knowledge. That's the point Wikipedia is missing today. That's why some people see a need to talk about "Wikipedia 1.0" and "peer review" and that sort of things every now and then.
If we were aware during the regular article editing process that - given that our mission is to collect knowledge - our strategy should be to *sort out information*, not to *collect information*, that 1.0 stuff wouldn't have to be discussed.
Uli