There's a major difference that makes Wikipedia fundamentally different than encyclopedias. Britannica was written primarily by experts ranging from Albert Einstein to Isaac Asimov, and everybody in between. And these writers would offer their own perspectives, insights, and expertise. It was a rich primary source.
Wikipedia, by contrast, is not a primary source, and writers are supposed to do little more than paraphrase reliable sources. This is a good idea in theory to solve the issue of going from having articles written by Einstein to having them written by random people, but it doesn't seem to work so well in practice. The problem is that topics whose framing is seen as relevant by some group or another (which is an absurdly large amount) drags in partisans, corporations, politicians, intelligence agencies and the rest of the dreg. And it leaves Wiki really hurting for quality on these pages.
I think it ceased to be a wiki a long time ago. The whole point of a wiki is to have the lowest barrier to entry possible for editing so any non-expert can jump in and change something quickly. The word “wiki” is Hawaiian for “quick”.
But these days, a huge amount of bureaucracy has sprung up around editing things on Wikipedia. There’s an immense number of rules; there are people with seemingly infinite time gatekeeping their favourite topics; there are protected pages; there are notability requirements; there are vast IP bans; and so on. Wikipedia has a bureaucracy fetish and an army of rules lawyers. You might argue that for the scale of Wikipedia this is required, and I’m sure there’s at least some truth to that, but that is incompatible with the idea of a wiki.
