Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
==What Wikipedia is not==
- Mere collections of public domain or other source
material; such as entire books, original historical documents, letters, laws, proclamations and other source material that are only useful when presented with their original, un-modified wording.
For me, the key phrase is "only useful". For instance, we've sucked in quite a bit from the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships; the content is about as authoritative as one can get, and is frequently written as well as anything else in wikipedia, in which case there's not much to improve on once links are added. However, there are times when we have to prune out the anti-communist rah-rah left over from the 50s, update with ship info postdating a DANFS volume, and in a very very few cases - fix an actual mistake. Over time I expect that the wikipedia ship articles will become better than their DANFS ancestors.
So use of the PD info gives us a leg up in the goal of producing a reference superior to all others; by cutting out some typing and fact-collecting time, we get more cycles to spend on areas for which the info isn't as well-organized already.
Stan