A great idea combining wikipedia's anthole/beesnest/collectiveIntelligence philosophy with an expert-based topdown approach:

If I were a reference publisher, a library association, a university, a media company, or a foundation, I’d take Wikipedia as raw material and vet entries, perhaps even charging for the service: On demand or on the basis of traffic and links, I’d go in and vet already-written pieces and bless that version of it. Then maybe I’d publish a book from it. Subsequent changes would be unvetted until and unless I chose to or the audience asked me to review them.

It would be nice to see information flow the other way, too -- blessed Wikipedia pages could be tagged to that effect.

Also worth pointing out: this is where the "commercial use is OK" clause of the Wpedia content licence is essential. The first ones on the boat were link farmers, but monetizing wikipedia like this is going to be very big and very useful (and, thanks to Wpedia's nonprofit status, it won't skew or bias wikipedia itself).

(A Venture Capitalist calls this Red Hat Wikipedia, but that's a little misleading (if incredibly pithy) -- a single organization could only review the tiniest fraction of wikipedia's entries.)