Comment Re:It's finished, dummies (Score 4, Informative) 632
I'd add that the concept of "compendium of all human knowledge" included a whole lot of stuff that can't be cited. Unfortunately, Wikipedia decided that it was supposed to compete with Brittanica and other traditional encyclopedias and needed academic citations. All of a sudden humans who knew things outside the realms of academia were lesser again, and people who knew how to make a citation were greater, even if they didn't understand what they were citing.
I myself stopped participating after having an extended argument related to a minor edit I made, but the other guy had a citation. While I had real world experience on the issue and the other guy didn't, he had the citation. When I finally got the book he cited through inter-library loan, it turned out he had completely misunderstood the text.
I think Wikipedia or something like it will evolve to include different tags that let people determine if they want to read uncited or irrelevant information.