I think you've hit on the crux of the matter: if wik were merely an edit-warrior who got into fights everywhere, he would've been banned long ago. It's true some of his edit count is due to edit wars, but some of it is also due to simply being a very prolific editor with apparently a lot of time to devote to Wikipedia, much of it on relatively uncontroversial topics. Sometimes he also turns out to be right in his disputes, and his opponents use tactics no better than his, which further complicates things.
I think in general Wik's behavior isn't a major problem in terms of actual behavior, or at least no worse than any number of other users. The reason he ends up coming up a lot is that there's just so *much* of it. Other controversial users he gets into edit wars with, like User:Nico and User:Cantus, have far fewer edits of any sort (good or bad), so simply have less of a presence on Wikipedia, and therefore even when there are problems the problems are less frequent and more isolated. Wik is just everywhere, so when he gets into disputes, it's hard to ignore them.
As for what to do, it's unclear. The arbitration committee (on which I'm on) has been mulling it over for a while, and among both committee members and non-members, there are people who strongly favor banning wik and people who strongly oppose it (there've been posts of both sorts on this mailing list, for example).
The structural change is something that occasionally gets proposed but hasn't been detailed to anyone's satisfaction yet. The main issue is how we can make things less "fragile" without also losing the characteristic "anyone can edit any page" nature of Wikipedia. Personally, I wouldn't be against losing some of that for more-established pages---once an article has been hashed out over a period of a year or two by hundreds of people, the ability for anyone to change anything seems to do more harm than good. In fact, most major edits to something like, say, [[Israel]] will be reverted anyway unless there is plenty of talk-page discussion about each point first, so maybe it wouldn't hurt to make this restriction more technically-based.
-Mark