skeptic writes:
That is essentially wikipedia - why should it show up on top for anything even when there is much more quality material for given website.
That's to do with google, not with wiki. One of the criteria that pushes a page up in any given search is the number of incoming links to that page from pages that also contain the search words used.
Although that's a clever way of approximating the relevancy and particularly the importance of the page, it's impossible for google to devise a system that sorts out actual quality.
When we link to wiki from this thread, using the words that are the title of the particular wiki page in our posts, we help push the page up the results, and as people are doing this all over the internet, the high search engine results just reflect wiki's popularity, for better or worse.
So no, wiki does not cheat on search engines. It does not need to.
There's something to be said for looking further down the list when making google searches, and I keep it on a default of 50 results per page because of this.