Speaking as someone who worked for the Wikimedia Foundation: noncompete agreements? That just doesn't exist in our culture, as far as I know. But your idea seem

Speaking as someone who worked for the Wikimedia Foundation: noncompete agreements? That just doesn't exist in our culture, as far as I know. But your idea seems to overestimate the staff's importance when it comes to writing the encyclopedia. The community does all the content and most of the policy decisions, by themselves. The staff is there for things like ops, fundraising, legal, bugfixes, research, PR, and projects that require a longer-term vision. Ian Baker aka Raindrift recently did a cool project to expose how things really work on Wikipedia. People usually underestimate the process. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Raindrift/Workflows http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Raindrift/Workflows For example, here's the diagram for Articles: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Article_lifecycle.svg http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Article_lifecycle.svg