I think you've hit on the crux of the matter: if wik were merely an
edit-warrior who got into fights everywhere, he would've been banned
long ago. It's true some of his edit count is due to edit wars, but
some of it is also due to simply being a very prolific editor with
apparently a lot of time to devote to Wikipedia, much of it on
relatively uncontroversial topics. Sometimes he also turns out to be
right in his disputes, and his opponents use tactics no better than his,
which further complicates things.
I think in general Wik's behavior isn't a major problem in terms of
actual behavior, or at least no worse than any number of other users.
The reason he ends up coming up a lot is that there's just so *much* of
it. Other controversial users he gets into edit wars with, like
User:Nico and User:Cantus, have far fewer edits of any sort (good or
bad), so simply have less of a presence on Wikipedia, and therefore even
when there are problems the problems are less frequent and more
isolated. Wik is just everywhere, so when he gets into disputes, it's
hard to ignore them.
As for what to do, it's unclear. The arbitration committee (on which
I'm on) has been mulling it over for a while, and among both committee
members and non-members, there are people who strongly favor banning wik
and people who strongly oppose it (there've been posts of both sorts on
this mailing list, for example).
The structural change is something that occasionally gets proposed but
hasn't been detailed to anyone's satisfaction yet. The main issue is
how we can make things less "fragile" without also losing the
characteristic "anyone can edit any page" nature of Wikipedia.
Personally, I wouldn't be against losing some of that for
more-established pages---once an article has been hashed out over a
period of a year or two by hundreds of people, the ability for anyone to
change anything seems to do more harm than good. In fact, most major
edits to something like, say, [[Israel]] will be reverted anyway unless
there is plenty of talk-page discussion about each point first, so maybe
it wouldn't hurt to make this restriction more technically-based.
-Mark