[jacobolus]

If you can’t be bothered to sign up for a free account, it’s unlikely you’ll do the (sometimes nontrivial) amount of research required to prove your case if you get in an edit war with another author.

You could equally well say “I find obvious errors in textbooks / lecture videos / journal articles / paper encyclopedias / ... all the time but it’s too hard to contact the author so I don’t do anything about it”.

The main difference is that in Wikipedia you can do something about it with some extra effort. So it’s actually a much better situation than most kinds of resources.

The pages that are “locked” are usually locked because they are spam magnets. Not allowing IP edits is unfortunate (and does discourage simple corrections to articles), but in the highest traffic parts of the site the work saved from not having to revert dozens of low-effort vandal posts is (at least arguably) worth the downside.

> overruled by partisan

You wouldn’t believe the amount of abject nonsense and spam that gets cleaned up by those “partisans”. But Wikipedia is an open project, the “partisans” here are just other (slightly more experienced) volunteers not in any way fundamentally different from yourself, and if you can convincingly prove your case via polite conversation you will win the argument (if there is a local dispute it’s generally possible to get more eyeballs on it by escalating to a broader group of volunteers).

* * *

P.S. someone named Slartibartfast turning down a chance to work on the real-life Hitchhiker’s Guide?

[s1artibartfast]

I love the idea, I just get shit canned every time I try. I have an interest in legal cases and have had my sources rejected when they are the SCOTUS official proceedings. Not for subjective claims, but obvious factual ones like who were the named defendants and who their lawyers were on a case. There are groups that like a not factual spin and I don't have the time in the day to go through Wikipedias adjudication system against someone and their possy.