Thanks for your comments, Ben. I hope you're enjoying the southwest :-)

Thompson's approach seems to be very pragmatic and makes business sense. As an independent operator, I'm a bit further out on the edge ;-)

Yes, I've heard about Citizendium, which appears to reinforce existing hierarchies of institution-based expertise - the "experts" get to choose the other experts. With Citizendium's constraints on publishing, I don't think that it will be as successful nor as useful as Wikipedia, though.