The goal of academic research is to inform the best and brightest of the real information. For e.g. academic extensions to how nuclear power works, or for engineers to have a working basis to build a viable power plant, and so on.

The goal of an encyclopedia though is arguably different: to make people "feel" informed, without necessarily being so? Or at least to serve as a starting point for further studies, maybe?

Science marches ever onwards, and eventually that gets collected into textbooks, and even later into encyclopedias. Or maybe now we're working from a new model where it could skip that middle step? But science still seems leagues ahead of explanations to the masses, and whereas in science the infighting is purposeful and helpful (to a degree), the infighting of making something explainable in a clearer manner to more people is also purposeful and helpful, though federating seems to me to be giving up on making a centralized repository of knowledge, i.e. the very purpose of an "encyclopedia"?

Science reporting must be decentralized, but encyclopedias have a different purpose and so should not be, maybe? At least not at the level of Wikipedia.