I love all the high quality, well researched, and well sourced answers on here. In the spirit of sharing knowledge, I imagine historians that post here wouldn't mind that knowledge being shared with Wikipedia's much wider audience. Nevertheless, it doesn't seem right to blatantly copy others' work and redistribute it even if it was posted to a public forum to begin with.
Of course, anything transferred to Wikipedia would need to adhere to their policies regarding sources, editorial style, neutral voice, etc. A lot of the good answers on here would probably be able to supplement the corresponding Wikipedia articles with only minor editing.
Thoughts?
EDIT: First of all, thank all of you for the discussion. The situation is much more discouraging than I I hoped (although mostly on par with what I feared). I guess I'll just be glad that I know about this awesome subreddit and stick to getting my history fix here.
As a former Wikipedia editor this gets really dicey.
You would have to seek the permission of the relevant user permission to use if on Wikipedia by releasing it under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA. Wikipedia has [very specific guidelines for doing this that involves multiple people to verify it.] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requesting_copyright_permission) Even then many answers to highly specific AskHistorians questions would not always abide by Wikipedia's Manual of Style. What makes a good /r/AskHistorian answer would rarely make a good section of a Wikipedia article.
I would ask permission of the individual posting the remark in each instance. I can think of several reasons they may feel reticent to have someone else repost their answers on Wikipedia, and I imagine others may have different reasons of their own.
What does Meta mean?
If someone were to use an answer I made to incorporate into wikipedia, I wouldn't have a problem with that, as long as they sought my permission first! The bigger issue as others have said is that this forum in of itself isn't a source.
Most of our answers are inappropriate for Wikipedia as they are historical interpretation, whereas Wikipedia is very "just the facts ma'am," and if historical interpretation is included it must be done in an overview way "some historians think x, some think y, 9 out of 10 historians recommend Crest" sort of way, which I'm sure you've read on Wikipedia. Our answers are more "here is an expert opinion," a bit closer to a book or an essay than to an encyclopedia entry. So most of our content just isn't right for Wikipedia. I can't think of any of my favorite answers that would be right for Wikipedia.
But you might be happy to know some of our flaired users are active on Wikipedia! And if you really like someone's work you should PM them and encourage them to do some editing on Wikipedia. Clearly they're not above working for free...
What about using these comments as sources, could that work? If so, a flaired user's answer is on the level of a well sourced blog.
I think it would be usefull, now it only reach people that read this subreddit, the answer, if added to wikipedia could then be translated in other languages and spread the information too the whole world