[jumelles]

> No effort to distill key elements of these entities' impact -- let alone the how and why of what they do. It's just endless what and when.

This is tricky, because some editors on Wikipedia would interpret that as "original research" and remove it. The rule of thumb is that the citation needs to contain the information added, not just allude to it.

[GCA10]

Exactly so. It's a rule meant to prevent one type of problem (people injecting unvetted nonsense or personal vanity/grudges into articles) that ends up creating a different and rather over-arching problem. On the longer articles, Wikipedia becomes an almanac of disjointed facts, not an encyclopedia of coherent knowledge.