The authors of Wget are far from anonymous. Hrvoje started with the first version, but hasn't been around for a while now. However, it's not that Wget "lost" the battle with curl. They are two different applications with different use cases. Curl is predominantly a library, while wget focuses on being a small downloader application.

Only thing is, curl has far more contributors than wget. This is because of its licensing and it being a library. Not to mention the brilliant stewardship provided by Daniel.

P.S. I do often contribute to Wget and may be a little biased towards it.

Straight from the GNU page:

"The original author of GNU Wget is Hrvoje Nikšić."

lolwut?

I've downloaded hundreds of billions of things with wget.