Could Wikipedia ever be forked by a group that wanted to compete by trying to win with a better culture and/or technology?
It's such a hostile culture it'd be nice to get rid of persnickety behavior, and indulgence of unproductive obsessive personality traits (like deletion binging, worrying more about rules than the spirit of the rules).
Everything on Wikipedia is CC-BY-SA or free-er, and the software that runs it is GPL. If you think you can do better, feel free to try. I'm fairly certain several people have already tried. I personally find the "hostile culture" to be not too different from a culture with high standards, and high standards are exactly why Wikipedia is popular - you see exactly the same criticisms leveled against StackOverflow and other essentially "canonical" resources on the web. I would not be surprised if anyone who cares at all about quality will get a lot of people complaining that their contributions were ignored or that it's impossible to add anything to these resources.
There is a real difference between pursuing quality and being unproductively persnickety. One doesn't require the other.
Take your example of SO, the issue became so bad in 2013 they had to revamp the way moderation worked. They wouldn't have done that if it were just a bunch of people wanting to lower quality.
It's such a hostile culture it'd be nice to get rid of persnickety behavior, and indulgence of unproductive obsessive personality traits (like deletion binging, worrying more about rules than the spirit of the rules).