Of course Wikipedia is useful, it is a impossibly vast collection of information on every topic imaginable. While there are of course the dangers of misinformation, the better articles provide sources their authors have cited while writing them, and expanding one's research beyond Wikipedia is always advisable. It is actually not that easy to permanently edit a Wikipedia article, even more so as a non-registered user. As the database has a save backup of all its pages, acts of vandalism or changes that are seen as unnecessary or wrong by the administrators can be easily reversed.Sometimes even right information is erased, such as when I tried to correct a translation of a German word and found the change gone the next day, most likely because I am not registered.
It requires more work for the industry, but yes produsage can be profitable, sponsoring popular produsers for instance or charging fees on creative databases (Deviant Art is very successful in this field) Already shows and people have managed to jump from YouTube to regular TV and dozens of talented people have been discovered on the net before earning fame in the real world.
I am not a big fan of the concept of produsage, as to me it just sounds like a million people producing so much bad media that it is impossible to find the good stuff beneath all the garbage. The same I think is true for citizen journalism and I am very afraid that it will replace traditional journalism in the future, after all it is so much cheaper for a news website to provide space for people then for a newspaper to hire a journalist. Not only destroys this jobs, but it reduces the news, or source of information on recent events, to an unreliable pile of misinformation written by a myriad of uneducated, or simply not eloquent, people. While it is true that news agencies are not perfect either, I find it dangerous to make people rely on forums and user-edited databases for their information.
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