and using WP to improve WP is… not a good idea.

That is not inherently true. For example, there was an instance when I read a Wikipedia article, and a chart was simply incomplete, there were entries in the chart left blank, when I knew that data existed. All I had to do was look up those exact items in Wikipedia and the correct numbers were there, readily available.

I think that was when I first created a Wikipedia account for editing. There was an article clearly missing information and I knew it would be both non controversial and quite easy to fill in that information.

My point is, that first article could definitely be meaningfully improved, using only information already available on Wikipedia.