If you ask me when it will be considered properly academic (and I don't mean to be overly optimistic here), my hope is never.
A friend told me an amusing horror story about how someone made up a bogus term and added it to a Wikipedia article, and the bogus term was then included by an irresponsible "scholar" in a "scholarly" publication, which was then located as a "citation needed" by an editor on Wikipedia. When the originator of the bogus term approached the article editors to explain that the term was bogus, and that they knew it was bogus because they made it up themselves, they were informed that the term was cited in a scholarly publication, and would not be removed! I don't know how true that story is but if you ask me it's plausible.
What they've been telling us at school is that Wikipedia is an excellent jumping off point for scholarly research. So if some teacher or classmate or other colleague tells me about some social theory I can quickly jump on Wikipedia and get an overview that will rapidly give me an idea of whether or not the theory is relevant to my research or I shouldn't waste any more time on it, and it can give me a range of easy links to starting points in the (more or less) scholarly literature that I can maybe start with. So when used with caution it has the potential to help researchers do higher quality work by freeing up time for focusing on the most important things. In my limited experience, research can be a mind blowingly exhausting process, so in that sense every little bit helps.
I think that in terms of comparing Wikipedia to similar encyclopedias of the past, that were distributed as printed publications, I think it has the potential to be better as a general access resource, for a lot of reasons. For example. Because there is not as much limitation on article size and because it can expand to basically any size without worrying as much about storage spaces. And because publication costs can be reduced in so many ways and because the information is crowdsourced from a range of experts (slightly problematic there I admit) rather than just a few (theoretically) reducing bias. Because there is no cost for publishing a new edition, because it is constantly being edited and maintained up to date. And because anyone with internet access can get on it and hopefully get a fairly decent basic understanding of what interests them. It's like Sparknotes, but free and in many cases better quality. (Sparknotes is the absolute lowest garbage of literary criticism, for example... It's gotta be impossible to do lit crit worse than Sparknotes.)
I'm not sure that encyclopedias of the past have been considered appropriately academically rigorous for citation in scholarly research either. I can't imagine citing Britannica in my research... it would be a humiliating admission of poor scholarship. I might use Britannica to gain a bit of general knowledge about something that I might investigate further... but I would never use it as an end-point of scholarly research. Well Wikipedia is like that... only much better, because it is compiled from more sources.
Here is a story from my own experience about the potential of Wikipedia. Well, at the moment I'm doing some work with Indigenous language records that were made by a national anthropological society in the late 19th century. There is a language I was investigating that is considered extinct in scholarly literature. But when I looked the language up on Wikipedia as part of my activities tracking language naming standards, someone had contributed the information that this conception of extinction is due to a linguist's description in her recordings of the man she worked with in making her recordings as the last surviving man of the tribe who spoke that language. The Wikipedia contributor stated that the language is on the contrary vigorously alive to the extent that it is being spoken as a first language by children in communities, and that if the people who perpetuated this erroneous information had asked a single Indigenous person about the status of the language, they would have known that. So while these claims did not provide a citation, they give the scholarly community a clear indication of where their efforts should focus. They can be like, "Hey! Here is a whole other living language that we can go out and record, and revitalise!" So Wikipedia can feed back to the academic institution in a ways that can potentially be very useful.
You see, the world isn't perfect. Things can't be perfect in the real world, only in places like art, theory, mathematics. But we do the best we can, don't we?
