I appreciate the concern about validating and vetting using credentialed editors, but as someone who has come to rely on the expectation that Wikipedia will be possibly tainted by either bias or inaccuracy, or a combination of both, I can assure myself that I will not be completely trusting of what I find there. However, I do like using the resource as launchpad into real research where I previously knew nothing or very little about a topic, and the wiki entry often provides good key word qualifiers to help define and narrow searches in research databases.

If you cite a Wikipedia page, and include a “last accessed” parenthetical at the end of the citation, that would enable anyone to look up what the web page looked like when you accessed it.

This makes matters no more authoritative. But it does prevent “disappearing facts.”

For my money, 95% of the citations to Wikipedia are the sorts of things that do not need citation at all, along the lines of, “Deontology is an ethical theory that finds ethical norms embodied in notions of rights and duties. See ‘Deontology’, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontology (describing Deontology as ‘the theory of duty or moral obligation’).”

Ultimately, one could have overlapping processes, in the same way that Linux has odd and even minor version numbers. One location holds the live, “unstable” Wikipedia, with its current high-freedom editing policies. Another holds a snapshot that is being refined to stability, with a no-new-content editing policy and an emphasis on cleanup. The two efforts would work well together.

That said, it would take an enormous editing process to produce a true, vetted, stable version by experts of the sort that you describe. And I’m not at all confident that what they would come up with would be better than Wikipedia One. In the time it would take the “experts” to go through the hundreds of thousands of entries, I’d expect the scrum of Wikipedia One to have done a huge amount of new production. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if many entries in Wikipedia One were better-written and more accurate than what Wikipedia Two would spit out.