Er, you realize how poorly this reads to the uninitiated, right?
Experts shouldn't want to write encyclopedias. There's a reason you can't cite them --- not Wikipedia, not Britannica --- in real work: they're encyclopedias. They're not just tertiary sources; they're among the least prestigious of the tertiary sources.
I had exactly this problem back in 2007 when I spent some time on Wikipedia. It frustrated the hell out of me, but when I calmed down, I realized that even if WP worked exactly the way I had wished it did, contributing new research to WP is a waste of my time, and the alternative, contributing citations to published sources, is dreary work indeed.
The best advice I can offer a subject matter expert uninitiated in Wikipedia that wants to contribute to Wikipedia: write a book.
Encyclopedia of Physics (3043 pages)
Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology (912 pages)
Encyclopedia of Magnetic Resonance (6490 pages)
Encyclopedia Of Philosophy (6200 pages)
The Gale Encyclopedia of Nursing and Allied Health (6200 pages)
The Merck Index: An Encyclopedia of Chemicals, Drugs, and Biologicals (2564 pages)
Encyclopedia of Biological Chemistry (3000 pages)
Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications (139 titles in that series, at about 500 pages per title = 70,000 pages).
The Film Encyclopedia (1520 pages)
Encyclopedia of Horses & Ponies (384 pages)
The Kentucky Encyclopedia (1080 pages)
The Encyclopedia of the Swedish Flora and Fauna (100 volumes planned, and about 5,000 pages published so far)
Encyclopedia of Modern Coral Reefs (812 pages)
Encyclopedia of Geomagnetism and Paleomagnetism (718 pages)
Encyclopedia of Geomorphology (1200 pages)
The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism (1349 pages)
Wiley Encyclopedia of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (17,616 pages)
Encyclopedia of German Literature (1136 pages)
The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature (1772 pages)
The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization (2790 pages)
Encyclopedia of Aerospace Engineering (5810 pages)
Encyclopedia of Quantitative Finance (2194 pages)
Encyclopedia of Analytical Chemistry (16,504 pages)
That's enough. Go to http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-WILEYEUROPE2_SEARCH_... and see the list of 436 encyclopedias written by experts as published by a single company. Now add the CRC press (another 200+ titles), Oxford University Press (95 titles), and so on.
How did you ever come to the conclusion that "experts shouldn't want to write encyclopedias"? If you still believe that, then what are all the above experts doing wrong?
Thus, if 100 articles said X (the 100 articles being correlated by citing each other), and new, better research said Y, Wikipedia would wait until it's 101 v 100 before making an edit.
After the book was published, the editors should have allowed a dissenting opinion to at least gain a sentence, especially when backed with official records.
They do that because their job is to survey the sources.
More importantly, they default to the majority of the sources. They don't adhere to it. Part of the job of editing an encyclopedia is appropriately weighting sources.
The author of this magazine article is in the medium term going to get the Wikipedia article he wants, because the source he ended up creating is more authoritative.
That's presuming a great deal, don't you think? Besides, the format of Wikipedia isn't so much that an expert would need to write an entire encyclopedia as it is that they can contribute their knowledge of a tiny slice of the domain to an article.
Don't get so bogged down in the definition of encyclopedia--hell, almost all of those are printed on paper or optical media, so I guess Wikipedia isn't an encyclopedia either, and so we shouldn't limit ourselves.
Now here comes 'angersock, for whom that's not good enough. "No, it's not enough that I have the whole Internet to build a new site on, and the whole Wikipedia database to seed it with; no, I want the people working on Wikipedia to build the thing I want, and stop concerning themselves so much with that whole encyclopedia thing".
I'm caricaturing, I know, but really, I don't get where you're coming from here.
