This is a philosophy page, for a quick guide to wiki, check out OneMinuteWiki.
How much work can be done by all the members of wiki per second?
Wiki can be the search engine. What more do you want from a search engine than the page most people want to see who have your same question or interest.
How much time would it take a wiki to organize itself to give better results than google for the most common search terms?
Knowledge is power, but power isn't easy. You need to work at it. But if wiki can do net work, a percentage of that work can be used to do useful work. Like design robots, or change laws.
We could harness the power of people's hobbies. Isn't that all the open source movement is? It's just the power of people taking the time to peruse their hobbies. We have many more hobbies to take advantage of. Who has flown RemoteControlAirplanes? and had a bit of Engineering and looked at the Predator and thought they could do that themselves a whole lot cheaper than HowMuchThePredatorCosts?. What if we all worked to design our own civilian predator out of parts you can buy or make yourself?
There are three ways of looking at a wiki. Through links, searches, and recent edits. There are more, but don't mess with Texes. In other words, instead of spending all your time trying to keep the wiki the same, you should be reading and writing it for information.