Wikipedia + the talk pages is closer to an ideal encyclopedia.
One of the major criticism of Wikipedia is that it preempts the possibility of having multiple encyclopedias, and thus multiple points of view. But, once you consider the talk pages, you not only restore the multiple points of view, but you also get to witness the contests between them. In that way, at least, this is better than having multiple encyclopedias.
My ideal encyclopedia does not have hundreds of thousands of words of discussion about the important differences between en dash, em dash, minus and hyphen.
And this is about punctuation. Imagine what it's like on actually contentious issues - Balkans wars, various islands claimed by more than one territory. Etc.
I happen to be a typophile; so, those discussions are interesting to me.
On the other hand, those are probably just examples of bike shedding[1]. The various talk pages on the Balkan Wars articles range from about 9,000 to 15,000 words, for instance.
Of course, another aspect of encyclopedias is that they organize a body of information; while the main page may force a structure of some kind, talk pages tend to go all over the place. But agreed that they add much needed facts and POVs beyond the one wikipedia "way" on the main page.
Agreed, but that implies that people haven't given up on trying to get facts or information into pages that are managed nefariously. To me it feels like the talk sections have been dying off. So many things at wikipedia have become advertorials.
