I've been inspired by the discussion David Gerard and Brion Vibber kicked off, and I think they are headed in the right direction.
But I just want to ask a separate, but related question.
Let's imagine you wanted to start a rival to Wikipedia. Assume that you are motivated by money, and that venture capitalists promise you can be paid gazillions of dollars if you can do one, or many, of the following:
1 - Become a more attractive home to the WP editors. Get them to work on your content.
2 - Take the free content from WP, and use it in this new system. But make it much better, in a way Wikipedia can't match.
3 - Attract even more readers, or perhaps a niche group of super-passionate readers that you can use to build a new community.
In other words, if you had no legacy, and just wanted to build something from zero, how would you go about creating an innovation that was disruptive to Wikipedia, in fact something that made Wikipedia look like Friendster or Myspace compared to Facebook?
And there's a followup question to this -- but you're all smart people and can guess what it is.