I agree that a two-class system of editors wouldn't be desirable. I think that the basic idea of an encyclopedia by the people for the people is great. But it seems that in the past few years there has been a considerable rise of exclusionism on WP (the English WP isn't the worst offender, I admit, but it's quite noticeable there, too). For me, one of the strong points of WP has always been the broad coverage of up-to-date and minor topics. This is what makes it a valuable resource for me; if I want the Encyclopedia Britannica I know where to find it.

But nowadays I notice that the notability guideline is wielded all to often in order to get rid of well-written and factually correct articles. This just destroys value; it adds nothing. Worse, it strongly discourages knowledgeable editors from contributing. Nothing is more frustrating than wasting a considerable amount of time on an article just to have it deleted a few days later.

WP needs to go back to its roots. For a start, I think that WP should just get rid of this silly notability guideline. IMHO it's better to err in favor of including a subject. There are other, more objective instruments to judge the quality of an article.

You make it sound as if older researchers like me don't know how to operate a browser or how to enter wiki code. Quite the opposite. We grew up with the Internet as well, even before it was called that. :) The real problem with WP is that its policies don't encourage editing, because you know that most of the time your articles are being deleted or edited by self-proclaimed experts until they are rendered useless.

Why would this be any more of a problem? Academic authors ought to be able to cite research papers just like anyone else; in fact, they could even cite their own publications.

Have you actually tried? You cite your own (refereed) research papers, some smart-ass comes along and flags the article for deletion because it's not backed up by at least half a dozen third party sources and hence the subject is not "notable" enough.

IMHO (and in my own experience), that's the real reason why many academics stop contributing to WP. WP needs to change its policies (in particular, the notability guidelines) or find some other way to keep the deletionists at bay.

Well, any problem in NPC is a "special case" of any other problem in NPC, up to polynomial reductions. That's what completeness means.

Given JIT compiler frameworks such as LLVM (http://llvm.org/), there's no reason that an interpreter environment can't be as fast (asymptotically) as "real" compiled code any more. The real divide is between static and dynamic typing now. The latter gives more flexibility (unrestricted polymorphism), but defers type checks until runtime which of course incurs a runtime cost.