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The problem is that, with several notable exceptions, highly-educated people aren't drawn to Wikipedia.

I don't know about everyone else but I think that statement was a bit insulting.

If you think so, then you don't know Larry very well. I also think he's entirely correct, and I can't imagine how anyone can disagree. We don't attract very many highly educated people; I can think of maybe one or two dozen that would qualify.

What bothers me even more is that we don't even seem to be attracting non-academic experts either. Take a non-academic subject like Poker, for example. There is no formal field of study in it, and almost no academic research (a little bit at U of Alberta, but that's about it). But there are certainly dozens, if not hundreds, of professional and semi-professional players who would qualify as experts at a level more or less equivalent to a Ph.D. in some academic field. We happen to have one of them--me--and so we have at least the beginnings of some good poker articles. But where's our Bridge expert? Where's our cat breeder? Where's our expert woodworker? Our chef? Our basketball player? Hell, we don't even have expert coverage of most computer programming languages despite the number of serious geeks around here.

But unlike Larry, I don't think there's any systemic reason for our dearth of experts; I think it's just that the project is still young and small compared to what it needs to be to achieve our goals. Yes, we need an approval/review mechanism, and that's one of my goals for software development, but that in itself won't attract the experts. I think the only thing that will attract them is a proven record of success. And that will come with time, and with the work of the experts we do have. When the software gets closer to completion, and I can finish adding all of my poker stuff, and Magnus can add his wonderful biology stuff, and Axel his great Math stuff, etc., then we'll have some things to point to to say "look, this is what we've accomplished, and you can help us do more". That will draw the experts.

We may already be the largest Wiki in the world, but we simply aren't big enough yet to do what needs to be done. We need 5000 regular contributors, not 200. And we need to make sure the system can support them all, and do the things they need done to make good articles. For example, I really like the idea of having "staff" specialists in things like image processing, copyediting, and other tasks that we shouldn't necessarily expect subject experts to be good at. And we need to make it easy for authors to contact and work with those other people (that's why I wanted the e-mail and user talk page features, for example--I think they're critical to the collaborative process). If we build it, they will come.