> He attracted the ire of some wackjob when he referenced printed materials. Given his somewhat unique position, he had some stuff digitized and posted, ...

Were these published documents, which reviewers could independently obtain and verify?

> Were these published documents, which reviewers could independently obtain and verify?

That doesn't stop some of the people at WP from reverting everything. Which means OP's friend is left to either leave it reverted, or trawl through the various arcane dispute resolution / meta pages, arguing their case, building consensus, to eventually get people saying it should be left in. Or saying it should be left out because those meta pages sometime feel as random as tossing a coin.

Unsurprisingly this optimizes for people who tolerate vast amounts of meta bullshit, and not people who know what they're talking about and know what the good sources are.

There shouldn't be any need to build consensus – the behaviour described by the OP is plainly against Wikipedia policy.[1] That's not to say that it didn't happen, but it's important to be clear about what caused the editor's bad experience. Sometimes it's rogue editors and sometimes it's overly pedantic enforcement of policy, but edits are often reverted for good reasons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Offline_sources

I get that.

But facts ("Here's the catalog number in the New York Public Library, and how to request it via interlibrary loan.") shouldn't require consensus.

That's true, but on Wikipedia they do.

Especially for cases like that - if someone has more 'sway' on Wikipedia than you, they can (and will often) just say something like "Thanks for the source - I'll verify and if it says what you think it says, I'll add it in to the article." Then do nothing, ever again. In fact, unreliable citations, or citations that don't actually say what the citer thinks they say, that can be easily checked online are far more acceptable on Wikipedia than citing a book.

Inertia like this leaves useless pages like "Oplomachi" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oplomachi) live way after they should have been merged, as well as leading to the deletion of useful pages/sections/references.

The major articles, which are more likely to get attention, tend to be less dysfunctional than niche interests. That said, there are of course far more articles relating to niche interests than there are major articles.

It’s not about someone having more “sway”. It’s about someone having more free time to waste on an edit war.

Oh, believe me, there is sway - there is a hidden hierarchy. If you think you are equal in an edit war, and only need to be persistent, you're wrong. Can you lock an article or part of one?

So is there a Glassdoor equivalent for Wikipedia editors?

They don't until they do.

They were. Given his position, he was able to have some source material digitized and posted somewhere (either the agency's website or the archives for the county/city/whatever). I think at one point the wiki lords were ragging on about the absence of an article interpreting primary sources.

At that point it was too late... anything he did was on some tickler list and waging wiki-war was not worth the time investment.

For content that is very narrow niche (on the expert/author side, hopefully with a broader reader base to make it worthwhile) and thorough, Wikipedia might not be the place to write. You can try something like Wikia, where one person can create a topic they care about, and post their information (and welcome others to contribute).

Then someone can link form Wikipedia to Wikia.

Wikia isn't just for TV shows and games. For example, the text editor Vim has a Wikia section: vim.wikia.com

References are the basis of all material on Wikipedia. It's the only way to deal with bias at a global level. Your friend might be a decent person but there are lots of Commissioners of Public Works that aren't and have agendas that take a non trivial amount of effort and time to discover.

Printed references are references, and they shouldn't be rejected just because they aren't on the internet. But even when the author went to the trouble of putting those references on the internet, they were still deleted.

There's just no justification for that. Even if a policy required all references to be available via the internet, the author fulfilled that requirement.

sigh...there is justification. Which doesn't mean your friend and his content were treated shabbily.

If this was allowed, and Donald Trump is putting up his documents on the internet and referencing them on his wikipedia page would you allow it? It can do a lot of damage and people and organizations do this all the time and every day.

This is the kind of behavior the policy exists to prevent. Its well known that it isn't perfect Please read - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest

If something has has been officially published, and is available to the public, it's a reference. That's entirely distinct from someone citing their own stuff.

Edit: ... their own unpublished stuff.

He said that there were references, just print ones not available online. They are supposed to have equal status.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Offline_sources