In the Windows culture there is also the MSDN factor where once you get an MSDN subscription you have licenses for an insane number of Microsoft product so your SQL Server and Visual Studio and ... are all covered under one price. You are paying for it, but not for an application at a time, so why go with some vendor that wants more money?
It's not just readability that's a problem, it's also that relevant code, data, etc are scattered all over the internet.
Another problem is that many people struggle with english which is the defacto language for research. This introduces two problems: first, one must learn to speak english, then, one must learn how to trawl through academicese.
There have been various similar projects to wikipaper in the past, but one of the reasons that they fail is that not many researchers have the spare time to contribute to a project like this. I spoke to the guys running Google Scholar and they told me this is the biggest problem. I believe I have an innovative way to solve this problem however, anyone who wants more details please get in touch.
I believe that making it easier to understand research going on in neighboring fields will dramatically increase the rate at which research is performed.
It takes posts such as yours to get people to snap out of it.