I think a fundamental problem is that people are generally distrustful of the communist aspects of open-source editing. Capitalism might have taught us that something has more authority when it's privatized. People distrust motivations that don't involve money.

Nevertheless, thinking Wikipedia is useless due to biased opinions, etcetra, is to deny the human condition. You can't write an encyclopaedia with an arbitrary robot, even though people strive to achieve this end - even encyclopaedias require some amount of romantic fiction in order to turn any entry about an organism into something more than "Yet more biomass".

Intelligentsia-elitism doesn't like the fact that "anyone should be allowed to participate in this discussion". Because "peer review" literally means review by people considered your equals, and nobody wants to admit that anyone from the lowest common denominator that knows how to edit a wiki entry could possibly be considered his "equal".

You know how the American Constitution says "All men are created equal?". Britain had a good laugh at that one too.