>>12599608Here's what happened, anon. Sometime around 2006-7, the deletionists won, the inclusionists left, and then the deletionists, true to their name, deleted everything they could. After that fiasco, they took over the ArbCom, and booted out anyone who was writing anything.
The deletionist debate was then replaced by the "loose citation" "strict citation" split. This was whether claims needed to be individually cited sentence by sentence or whether you can write an original text so long as the claims are reasonably accurate when examined in light of all the sources together, evaluated critically as a whole. The strict citationists won that debate, so you can't write anything useful anymore.
This is most harmful when there are ab-initio arguments which can be followed by anyone versed in the field, but which are not found verbatim in sources. This is a common situation in mathematics and physics, where new proofs have no source, but are clearly and obviously uncontestable, as they're equivalent to existing stuff that's well accepted. The strict citationists now can prevent new articles from getting written, but thankfully they're too stupid to read mathematical sources to even verify whether the claim and the source agree, so you can snow them easily and get them out of your hair for a while, at least if you fill up a page with equations.
The politics on the site is abominable, you can't do anything useful anymore. Anything you write gets a stream of "citation required" tags and then it gets deleted, no matter how supportable. Providing citations doesn't help with politically resisted stuff, or even with just surprising sounding but well accepted stuff, because the talk pages aren't allowed to debate the topic, just the claims of sources about the topic, and the decision is ultimately entirely political, based on numbers for and against. Because of this, the people there have evolved a power structure which has absolutely no regard for accuracy. Pic-related.
