What next?

Barnstars are one of the few concrete payments that editors get, the other being various bureaucratic powers. The less tangible cognitive rewards are:

• promotion of topics of personal or professional interest
• demotion to topics of personal dislike or professional conflict

There is no bright line distinction between WP:BATTLEGROUND and "people edit topics that interest them". I have even seen one academic edit Wikipedia biographies of other academics with whom he had a professional disagreement in order to belittle them. (Amazing chutzpah and COI.)

The peer review initiative on Wikipedia is admirable, but larger issues limit its effectiveness. I don't know (or care much) about GA, but I have seen advertorials on DYK and hardly-above-average (which in Wikipedia means pretty bad) articles as FA. In general, the peer review is mostly at the WP:MOS rather than content level, regardless of the process involved. It has everything to do with having few editors per topic area. And when you can get more than a few eyeballs on some non-popular-culture article, they may have vastly different approaches and even ultimate goals. One of your fellow mathematicians said something along the lines of: wikiproject FA and wikiproject mathematics have different goals.