Absolutely it does.  But this is perhaps inevitable. The insistence on “reliable sources,” usually defined in very traditional ways, is the bulwark of the encyclopedia’s claim to “verifiability.” In this sense (and with its other mantra, “no original research”), there’s no doubt that Wikipedia is in itself very conservative.

I am currently helping to assemble a web-site on my political alma mater, Big Flame, and what I like best about this is re-reading materials we produced back in the day (when you dm boffins were mere yout).  The writers were, mainly, people who had deliberately rejected universities and their narrow conceptions of what constituted knowledge, and its purposes.  Wiki would certainly reject this web-site as a ‘reliable source’, yet the intellectual quality seems to me higher than most of what appears in ‘reliable’ academic journals.  Have a glance at this and see if you see what I mean. http://bigflameuk.wordpress.com/  Thus I think we should urge Wiki to judge intellectual quality not so much on its source, but its content.  And then we argue over what constitutes quality.