They got what they wanted. I can't see what incentive they have as a business to grant access to the books that justifies paying employees for it.
The average quality is going to be lower, of course.
Here's one discussion over over ten thousand words: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(poli...
The least interesting thing about Mexican American War is what type of dash you use between Mexican and American. There are over twenty thousand words about that dash on wiki meta.
15,000 words would be okay if at the end of it there was some kind of consensus, or something that could be tramsfered to different articles.
The future people are going to have a skewed image of us if they think meta wiki is representative.
Apple acquired a "Pandora for Books" recommendation startup which had permission from publishers, who provided text for indexing, http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-buys-booklamp-2014-7 . Their machine classification made it possible to search books for topics whose words were not present in the book.