I agree with your analogy to other volunteer projects, but Wikipedia is certainly a special case. For a given article that is connected to an academic disciplin

I agree with your analogy to other volunteer projects, but Wikipedia is certainly a special case. For a given article that is connected to an academic discipline, there is a good chance that it has at least one professional "babysitter" who is notified when changes are made. I can imagine that scholars have a portfolio on Wiki in the same way programmers do on GitHub. Point being that it's much easier for them to maintain high quality with low effort.