The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia
I think the overall problem is that wikipedia attempts to substitute policy for expertise.As other have pointed out, wikipedia has to deal with lots of bad edits from people who are not motivated by a pursuit of facts or truth.To deal with this, they've come up with a set of policies that the editors seem to enforce fairly rigidly. This does an okay job of preventing the wackos from taking over. Unfortunately, since the editors often lack the subject expertise to distinguish cranks from experts, these policies end up making it harder for experts to contribute in some cases.