>Why haven't you tried to address those inaccuracies?
Trying to edit wikipedia is a hellish experience. The vast majority of articles have one or more de facto owners who will do everything they can to preserve control over their turf. They tend to be experts in rules laywering which is how they got their power in the first place. So "addressing inaccuracies" typically involves 5 minutes of editing and a month-long war afterwards.
> Trying to edit wikipedia is a hellish experience. The vast majority of articles have one or more de facto owners
I'm so tired of this meme. No one owns an article. [0] You say "de facto", but just because someone disagrees with you on something, it doesn't mean they disagree with every edit or do it only for that article. The vast majority of articles barely have anyone watching them.
> who will do everything they can to preserve control over their turf.
The fact that you describe it as "turf" only further proves that you have this mentality of the article being a battleground.
> They tend to be experts in rules laywering which is how they got their power in the first place.
What power? Even admins on Wikipedia can't overrule consensus and discussion. What's this about rule lawyering too? They just understand the community norms better. I don't walk into a fancy restaurant and complain about "rules lawyering" after I get kicked out for breaking the dress code. Once someone tells you about a rule, you should read up on it, not boisterously claim that you should be above the community rules.
> Just the rules covering acceptable usernames are almost 4000 words long
Seems simple enough to me:
> This page in a nutshell: When choosing an account name, do not choose names which may be offensive, misleading, disruptive, or promotional. In general, one username should represent one person.
Those 4000 words should only matter if you don't find the above to be sufficient explanation.
This is a page on internal Wikipedia policy, so there is no question about the accuracy here. The parent comment was pointing out that, in principle, Wikipedia policy is that contributors do not "own" content on Wikipedia in the sense of having a right to refuse edits to content that they contributed.
On the contrary: Wikipedia users are just as much (if not more) subject to their own wishful thinking and dirty politics when writing internal policy pages as they are when writing regular articles. Especially that there is no requirement to cite sources for the former. The policies as written may fail to reflect how editing actually looks like; hell, they might even not be actual policies at all. A single person could slip a passage in a policy page that supports their own opinion without anyone else noticing, and later cite that passage as if it were authoritative. (Or imply authoritativeness by simply placing a mere 'essay' in the Wikipedia namespace.)
Nobody cares what should happen 'in principle' unless the principles are enforced — which they are often not. See for example how the enforcement of the verifiability policy looks like.[0]
Trying to edit wikipedia is a hellish experience. The vast majority of articles have one or more de facto owners who will do everything they can to preserve control over their turf. They tend to be experts in rules laywering which is how they got their power in the first place. So "addressing inaccuracies" typically involves 5 minutes of editing and a month-long war afterwards.
And that doesn't even begin to address that wikipedia's rules are insane to begin with. Just the rules covering acceptable usernames are almost 4000 words long (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username_policy).