Side note, it is very funny that the same people lamenting the state of Wikipedia seem to be desperate to have their topic included on it. If the site sucks, why care about it so much?
Its biggest advantage over traditional encyclopedias was its breadth and how quickly it could be updated. The trade-off was that articles could vary greatly in quality and could be edited by anyone, making accuracy less consistent than in traditionally edited reference works. So the effort to reduce breadth and say it shouldn't be updated quick... that's just strikes me (as someone fairly old) as kind of funny.
"Don't use Wiki as a primary source" is much more to the point - it's not meant to be. Use it to find the primaries.
Also, I don't see this as "reducing breadth" so much as attempting to hold to a minimum standard of "has this been written up anywhere by someone other than the people who started it?" which isn't perfect, but it's been the stance since the beginning.
1. So are most other encyclopaedias, and most don’t even give you references or citations for an article 2. We are literally decades from that point now. Surely you must agree that times have changed.
But how do you moderate? Do you establish your own ministry of truth? Only allow contributors with a university email address (shoutout to the arXiv)?
Wikipedia decided to externalize part of the vetting process by placing formal restrictions on the sources you're allowed to collect information from.
Sadly, there currently aren't any such sources for Odin.