There's a survivorship bias problem at Wikipedia, though. Most prominent volunteers swear that their motivation is just to make the encyclopedia better. They aren't sad that their contributions are submerged among many others; many claim that this is the beauty of Wikipedia.

But, like you, those who find they want some other motivations probably don't hang around (and probably leave well before their 100,000th edit).

So we don't quite know if Wikipedia would be any better if one could build a personal reputation, or if editors got some reward, tangible or intangible, from their contributions. I suspect it would be a big improvement, but people are understandably reluctant to mess with the current model.