Not only does wikipedia need to concern itself with highly established user flows ("sure it's not perfect but at this point I'm used to it" * millions of users)

Not only does wikipedia need to concern itself with highly established user flows ("sure it's not perfect but at this point I'm used to it" * millions of users), but I think a project like Wikipedia is A Genuinely Important Thing and therefore can't afford to fuck around with UI "experiments" like Reddit does and like Digg catastrophically tried. Trying to both provide a free online encyclopedia of Pretty Much Everything We Know and make it available to as many humans as possible, while also doing UI experiments on those users, seems too ambitious. Let reddit and facebook and google turn their users into lab rats. In ten years Wikipedia can take one or two actually useful bits of information generated from those experiments and implement them, as they're doing here.