I didn't realize Paul had a wiki already set up. After I finish a freelance project I will try to dedicate some time to help organize and get some things started on it.
I agree about having books on hand, and each perspective is different, especially for the days that you need to come back and reference something quickly. I think the wiki's purpose would be to ease people into the idea of permaculture and how to get started in a way that is close to alot of these books, but free. Also I see it as a valuable tool for people to quickly have a platform to show what they are doing in their garden and write a quick article that shows design and examples of how they are using permaculture in their lives, which is what Collin was referencing in his second or third post.
I love how they do it on this site
http://our.windowfarms.org/. They've open sourced a window garden and let the community submit all their creations and come together to find the sort of best configuration all together. The site functions as a way for anyone to go write a post about their implementation and talk about what they did and why, its awesome to see everyone's creativity with the project and to see the different results!
I don't think we are ever going to have a true "model" that works in every environment and climate, but I think we can all benefit from seeing everyone else's work in a more organized way than the forums. For instance, one of the things I have never seen in any book is workable examples for the southeast around Zone 7, most examples from US authors are west coast climates, or colder northern areas without really hot summers. I'd love to be able to open a page and see peoples workable examples from climates closer to mine as a source of inspiration!