A more social and personal editing experience

Actually, this cuts both ways. The old boys club divided in camps who form shifting battle lines based on camaraderie and personal antagonisms (even if originating from content disagreements), aka the "warlord encyclopedia", is a real issue. So, shifting Wikipedia closer to an Anonymous versions of Facebook may not be such a great idea as long as "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog".

Keeping in mind the ultimate goal of the project, having a system where individual edits are anonymous, so you really can only comment on the edits, would help with that, but then there's the issue of how to correlate and filter out the unhelpful edits, easily. (For instance, assuming that all newcomers will eventually embrace NPOV is totally unrealistic. Cranks and PR guys do edit there.) Right now, the main way to deal with that is the implicit reputation system given by the edit history. However, experience with mega-socking banned users, who can muster more IP addresses than you can shake a block at shows that ultimately keeping bad content out is only marginally dependent on self-identifying long term user histories. In other words, content-based (instead of username-based) user histories can work. (Something like the wikiscanner is also worth considering.)

WP:OWN is a real issue on many articles these days, because the number of editors per article continues to decrease, and the golden rule for small scale conflicts on Wikipedia is: whoever has most time on their hands wins unless blocked or banned. There are even elaborate essays on how to bias a given Wikipedia page or topic area to your heart's content (or pocket advantage), while not getting kicked out of the game.

Of course, bureaucracy being what it is on Wikipedia, there's little hope for significant change, even if it were supported by a ton of empirical evidence. The social environment that Wikipedia created is self-reinforcing, meaning that mostly people who agree with how stuff happens stick around, and they in turn reinforce the social interaction patterns that drew them in initially. Defeat in detail applies to the trickle of newcomers who think otherwise.