Tom, you're going way overboard with this. We don't need a full-fledged content management system to do wiki newspapers.
I didn't say we need one. We need a simple, specialized tool. I can write a prototype in a day, easy. All it needs to do is three things:
- a comfortable WYSIWYG editor to write individual articles
- a simple javascript front-end that allows a drag-and-drop layout process with a few pre-defined templates
- a very simple permission system to determine who can write articles for which paper
