You know, ete, I get where you're coming from, and the way you're saying you'd go about it makes a lot of sense on some levels. Just a few concerns:
-One good thing about the current system is that it allows for feedback from people higher up in a way that is easily visible to the contributor and everyone in the community. This helps people to improve contributions in the future. With the wiki, I guess you could vm people to help them out or something, but that seems inefficient, and people might get discouraged if their edits were rejected, especially if they got no feedback whatsoever. The current system
guarantees feedback. As someone who might start getting more into C&C once my school work lets up, and as someone who has a few leadership roles IRL, I can say that feedback is incredibly valuable, especially to people just entering the system. Even for people already on QC and GP, feedback is important, because not all QCers and GPers agree with each other all the time. Having the thread there with visible conversations is a far better way to come to a consensus than checking things one by one. It helps everyone improve. If the wiki system had something in place where you could make sure new contributors got some sort of feedback on their submissions (good AND bad), then that would be great. It would have to be easier to follow than
bulbapedia's method, though, because that's really chaotic, hard to follow, and not immediately obvious to a new contributor. Also, their system doesn't really force anyone to discuss anything as far as I know.
-Having unfinished stuff on-site is not ideal. Sure, maybe it would encourage more contributors, but... with the wiki system, if someone just wanted to write a skeleton or submit a moveset with no explanation, would you put that up or not? If so, it wouldn't be pretty, AND there would be no incentive for anyone to work quickly on the rest of it; instead of "rotting in C&C", it might rot on-site instead (which has the added disadvantage of looking unprofessional). If not, then that's not much different from the current system, except not as much would be required of the contributors, and there would be less feedback. From what I understand, in the current system, reserving an analysis to write gets you a big fire lit under you, and thus you're pressured to complete it satisfactorily, and if you do not do so, it gets re-assigned. This is not a bad thing. It encourages high-quality submissions along with high-quality contributors, and quality is much more important than quantity, right?
-As for time spent checking edits, I'm really not convinced that wikifying the site would decrease that time from what is spent checking the small changes threads. Having a wiki with an obvious edit button would encourage far more edits than having the small changes thread. You probably see this as a good thing, but really, with an obvious button, you're far more prone to noob edits than you are with a thread that people have to search for. The act of searching for the thread is somewhat of a noob screen: even though noobs can post in those threads too, noobs with no knowledge probably aren't as likely to put the effort into looking for the thread and posting in it. People more dedicated to making the site better will make that extra effort. This might not actually turn out to be a problem, but it's something to consider.
-As Macle said, "Right now we have the most competitive and knowledgeable people posting analyses on site. I don't see how opening it up to anyone that wanders by with make it better." Anyone who wants to contribute under the current system is perfectly free to do so. Anyone we would want to stick around would be the type of person willing to wade through a bit of red tape if it meant a better final result. The current system encourages only the most motivated people to contribute, but again, this is good in that motivated people get things done, AND they get things done well.
Wow, I wrote an entire wall of text again. Sorry about that. I guess my main concern with the wiki idea is that it seems to encourage the more lazy sorts of submissions, whereas the current system encourages contributors to make well thought-out write-ups. That, and the feedback thing in my first bullet.