I strongly disagree with this reasoning Jeremy, sites like investopedia and wikipedia would not exist (and be so popular) if people did not view the internet as a source of information.

I think you're absolutely correct for repeat users.

I am thinking upstream for the first-time user, where they just want a term defined quickly and accurately. Or as David G puts it more broadly: what job are you trying to help me get done? In this case we're telling you what an investing term is and how you can use it.

I think once you help a new member get that job done by explaining their term of interest, then comes the branding side of bringing them back to help them get subsequent jobs done. That's where wikipedia and sites like it got its popularity.

Let me explain a little further and then I'd love to know if you agree with the reasoning or if I'm still off the mark.

basically being more of a tool than a community
One thing I'd like is greater inter-mingling and aggregation of communities within the Fool. I would love a scenario where there wasn't a boards community, a CAPS community, and a article comment community, but just one motley community with different tools (CAPS, boards, articles, wiki) to help people get their job done.

For example, on our site we have 3+ communities that all do things with the concept "Netflix" (disc: long NFLX) but there is very little overlap. If they were all tied together as one "world's greatest investing community" then our collective knowledge about Netflix would be much greater.

Being the guy who's responsible for it, I can say that to date we have done a very poor job of threading CAPS and the boards throughout our articles and homepage. With the tab reorganization I hope we can change that, so more Fools can benefit from the valuable knowledge created every day on the boards and on CAPS. And we will not repeat that mistake when we integrate the wiki.

So I don't view the fact that the wiki won't have a tab as a relegation. I view it as embracing the fact that our site and community are about two things: investing and community, and every page on our site should reflect that.

Jeremy