Wikipedia won over competitors because it has an anti-business-model. Only the passionate write for it, which paradoxically ensures quality. My favorite content on the internet is always non-profit, sincere stuff. Like this comment thread :)
That's a scary prospect for creators that live off the internet, but if the ecosystem is already doomed it may be the last option.
Wikipedia won over competitors because Jimmy Wales honed his marketing tactics from years of being a pornographer. Not because of any inherent strength of the wikipedia platform. In fact those first articles on wikipedia were all horrible and far worse than the other online encyclopedias if you remember. Wikipedia's success was mostly due to good timing, good governance and great SEO.
And btw it is hysterical some think HN is non-profit. Sure, perhaps technically. But this is exactly why I think we are doomed. If even the self-proclaimed guardians of the internet (ala the IT Crowd) cannot grasp the simple concept that HN is as astroturfed (if not more) than reddit there is simply no hope for the internet as a whole to understand these concepts. So long and thanks for all the phishing attempts.
With the March updates I thought there was a chance that Google could pull it off, but now I am leaning towards it's all doomed. Personally I wish I never got into building websites when I have to compete with ugly wordpresses from SEO companies in India taking my #1 spot for English content.
I wish I could get angry about the forbes articles in my niches but at least that's written ostensibly by a professional-- when you start getting beaten by center-aligned text from South Asia you know there was -never- a chance for quality to win.