[gwern]

Indeed. It's not hard to see how they could be producing value: if nothing else, they could be working on Wikipedia which always has an infinite number of tasks to do (such as copyediting, to tie into the OP, although a bachelor's or master's holder could be doing much more valuable in-depth research for an article), and that would produce a lot of value for all the hundreds of millions of Wikipedia users. The problem is capturing some of that value and returning it to them as a living wage.

[dev1n]

Actually this problem could be solved in the same way most programmers take up side projects. Even the projects that are not designed to supplement income are valuable to an employer. Editing a hundred pages in Wikipedia has got to be a pretty decent way of selling yourself, even if just on a resmue, to an employer. That's a sort of "buzzword" that isn't found often. Instead of sitting around filling out 20 applications, that person could have just edited 10 pages of Wikipedia, and felt better about themselves too, and just added something extremely unique to their profile.

[gwern]

I doubt it. I've edited far far more than a hundred pages (http://www.gwern.net/Wikipedia%20resume), and I never got a job offer nor did it ever make any discernible difference to my life - which is inline with what I heard (or rather, didn't hear) from all my Wikipedian confreres. When I switched my efforts to my own website, then things changed a little bit.

[rprasad]

Only until the Wikipedia Mafia reverts all of those changes and then bans your account for "vandalism."

One of the best ways to get contacts in a field is to volunteer for an organization that does exactly, or something in the neighborhood of, what you want to do.