I don't mean to intrude, but I have noticed the same, W.  There is a solution, but it's the baddest of bad words, on Wikipedia: deadlines.  The vast majority of words written by journalists and academicians weren't written because they wanted to.  Version 1.0 is moving along, and the Germans are almost ready to issue their printed, 50K-article, 1000-printed page Bertelsmann (Random House) encyclopedia, having been hard at work on the printed version since 2004.  Not getting a core of publishable articles on Wikipedia is simply not an option; it will be printed in some form or another, and as soon as it looks like someone else is beating us to it in this new wiki-world we've created, my guess is we'll get something out the door, if we have to hire content experts or translate the German printed encyclopedia to do it.  Every wikiproject should be thinking about these things. - Dan  (mistakes)