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Wikipedia is a soapbox. The core content policies are premised on knowledge being verifiable, on neutral point of view being possible, and on imperfect people coming together to summarize the findings of others. These premises are nerdy, idealistic—and political. To edit Wikipedia in good faith is to declare that these premises are, or at least ought to be, true, and that they matter, and that embracing them makes the world better.
There's a flip side: the specificity of the premise of Wikipedia and the sorts of people an Internet-based project like this attract combine to create systemic bias in the encyclopedia. This creates undue weight for some topics and lends the operation of the place into certain directions, e.g. toward the free culture movement. But if you embrace those premises, you know it's worth it anyway.