I’m not a historian (although some of my other writing starts to resemble history), but remembering a series of civil war lectures by the new breed of historians (returning to source data), I’ d say “no” on both counts. To serve as a repository for source data, Wikipedia would have to abandon the “notability rule” altogether–after all, for new civil war history work, the historians are looking at the letters and journals of the “everyday” people involved in the war, not just the Notable Figures.

But that’s already saying more than I really know. As a reader, I want narrative. As a sometimes-investigator and frequent writer, I want both narrative and access to source material.

That said, as a historian of sorts, I am suspicious of narrative. I like to see the bones of history. For something like Alexander, narrative too often smoothes over difficulties of sources or interpretation, so to the extent that Wikipedia’s fragmented production can voice these issues, I cheer it.

On balance, however, I think the loss is greater than the gain.

This, I suspect, is a situation, not a problem (that is: problems have solutions; situations don’t). And it’s certainly the case that many of those who set about shouting down Citizendium before it really even began did so on the basis that Wikipedia is all we need, and nothing can compete with it.

Wikipedia has many potential shortcomings, and these potential shortcomings become more worrisome if people go to Wikipedia to Learn What They Need To Know rather than going there to get an overview of a topic and a list of sources or links. It’s this list of sources that I find to be the true value of Wikipedia. In effect, they’ve become the directory equivalent of Google (rather like Yahoo was at one point, and to some extent still is). I know that my students will go to Wikipedia, and I can’t tell them not to. But what I can do is teach them to use it as a jumping-off place to find more authoritative sources simply by following the links in Wikipedia. And that’s how I use it, myself.

As you say, the factoid writing style is probably a necessary companion to multi-author articles having no editorial oversight. But if the goal is to become a Directory With Context, this style doesn’t actually bother me and, in fact, helps to reduce emphasis on the tool as an end in itself.