> Debates about notability are common on WP and not inherently political.

"sometimes it's not political" is not really a defense to the claim of "this time it probably was".

Anyway, the problem is there's a lot of valuable content on wikipedia that is essentially borderline according to the rules, but also delivers a lot of value, and this content exists at the suffrage of whether or not they have some greasy nerd as patron or whether another one gets a bee up their ass about it.

"Lists" policy is a great example, and I've seen quite a few important lists go through cycles where despite being a de-facto resource for 10 or 15 years, all of a sudden some editor will get a bee up their ass and just delete it all, because WP:Lists. But of course having been the resource for 15 years, nobody external has bothered to collate a list that already exists on wikipedia, but if you point that out then you get the WP:OriginalResearch response. If you revert the changes, they'll lock it for "vandalism", etc. So we just lose that resource that's existed for 10-15 years, unless some other sufficiently greasy nerd pushes back on it.

The wikipedia editor cadre sucks, it's the definitive answer to the question of "what's the absolute least power that can go to someone's head". It's a real problem with the public trying to interact with wikipedia, much like stackoverflow answers everyone just knows it's not worth the time and does their damndest not to interact with it if they have any other alternatives.

And yes, "anyone can do it" in principle but it's not the public's job to push uphill to try and chase out bad actors in the organization. People won't do it and they'll just go do better things and you'll be left with only the toxic people - it's the "dead sea effect" in action. A sufficient concentration of poison will kill any life that might have any chance of remediating the poison.

https://medium.com/@jayhanlon/welcome-wagon-dd57cbdd54d9

Much like stackoverflow and the "come to jesus" moment a couple years ago when they tried to get SO members to stop being so fucking toxic to newcomers and people trying to ask the questions that let SO create content (to which the community basically shrugged and said they wouldn't "compromise community standards" by not shitting on people/pressing their mod buttons to suppress stuff for arbitrary reasons/etc), the cancer is so ingrown at this point that you can't save the organization without putting policies in that those greasies are going to hate, and that will kill the host organism. So it's terminal. Wikipedia editing is the same as StackOverflow commenting and has been for years. It's not that they're going to go under, but they're not everything they could be either, and there are often distinct points where the quality of the product has gone down over the years rather than up due to these problem children.

(I found a comment from myself 5 years ago saying this exact same thing in fact, lol)

Powermods on reddit are sort of another case of this too... it's not a great system to have some random greasy nerd from 2008 squatting on some common keyword/brand name while moderating poorly. But now it's entrenched and if you change the policy they're all going to shut down their subs in solidarity, so you have to essentially be willing to hammer down on the whole mod class and come in and replace all of them. It's the old "10% of the employees are real shitasses but they're protected by the union so we can't really do anything about it" problem.