" call ""current"" discussion; that is, our discussion of the big changes you started here just about 30 days ago.  It will be hard to anyone coming to the discussion at this point to know much of what we're talking about with this much removed.  

I know, but then not much was being removed.  But I've put back October.

 Cultural depictions of Johannes Gutenberg 

I've started an approach that may apply to Wikipedia's Core Biography articles: creating a branching list page based on in popular culture information.  I started that last year while I raised Joan of Arc to featured article when I created Cultural depictions of Joan of Arc, which has become a featured list.  Recently I also created Cultural depictions of Alexander the Great out of material that had been deleted from the biography article.  Since cultural references sometimes get deleted without discussion, I'd like to suggest this approach as a model for the editors here.  Regards, ''' 

Clean-up and changes by Mukerjee Oct 18

A number of changes were made and the article was considerably cleaned up on
Oct 18:

 The claims of printing in Korea and China, largely unreferenced were referenced with extensive quotations
 The Biography section which was only a paragraph with other fragments scattered elsewhere was cleaned up (but still needs work). 
 The contributions of Gutenberg as the father of the printing press and a leading catalyst of the Renaissance have been under challenge from a number of quarters, this was presented with documentation
 The possibility that East-West traffic over the two preceding centuries of the Mongol Empire may have led to some knowledge in Europe of movable type  was introduced 
 A number of sentences and structures (such as the unwieldy initial paragraphs) were copyedited ruthlessly, merged with other fragments, and cleaned up. 

User Dicklyon reverts with the comment: too much of a change to do without discussion. 
This is not a criteria in Wikipedia, where ruthless editing is consistently
encouraged. 

Please justify in what way these changes are inappropriate and merge them by
putting in extensive work instead of just a revert. 

I am reverting back to the new version which certainly reads better, and has 
far better referencing and citations than the present version.  Please give
your reasons here; please do not blindly revert; edit''' the text 
to merge the elements you don't agree with.   It does not make sense to keep
the older inferior version that people are working with still.   

Such an extensive edit that throws out the stable work of many editors over many months, with no chance for incremental review and collaboration, is just too disruptive and disrespectful, in my opinion.  But I'll let someone else decide now whether to revert you again.  I recommend a revert, followed by you re-integrating changes piece by piece, with time between for reactions and negotiations.  

p.s. We don't need weasle words in the lead.  If it is verfiably true that ""Even within Europe, there are those who claim that Laurens Janszoon Coster of Holland may have used movable types earlier,"" then you have to say WHO makes such a claim, and give a verifiable reference for it.  The things I have read about Coster did NOT say that anyone actually claims or believes that, only that it was a local legend for a while.  

I understand your angst at having many microscopic changes gone.  But the so-called ""stable"" version read rather poorly, and at least the English and the flow is a lot cleaner.  There were repeated references (e.g. two consecutive parags referred to his family in Biog; the A&E; award had two references, etc), there were poor constructs,
and of course, the referencing was admittedly poor.  So please try to look at the whole picture.  Wikipedia says it right up front - edit the page only if you don't mind others ""ruthlessly"" editing your text. 
As for the weasel word issue, this is what the current version reads (pls see the Biography section) - these were edits that were made before your comment here:

His business partner was Johann Fust who was more of a banker than a printer, but a 1568 history by Hadrianus Junius of Holland claims that the basic idea of the movable type came to Gutenberg from Laurens Janszoon Coster via Fust, who was apprenticed to Coster around 1940 and may have brought some of his equipment to Mainz