I have been a fan of Wikipedia since I first learned about it, about six months after it launched. What a concept! Anyone can edit, citations are required, revisions are kept indefinitely. That's a recipe for building a clearinghouse of human knowledge with the power of iteration.

But I am also a non-fiction researcher/writer, and I experience some problems caused by Wikipedia:

1) I like to dig deep into historical stories--newspapers, archives, court records, FOIA requests--and I try to produce high quality, well-sourced articles about historic events. Inevitably, someone updates the Wikipedia article(s) to include new information I have surfaced, which exiles my article to the digital dustbin in favor of Wikipedia. Occasionally the Wikipedia editors cite my article in their updates, but much more often they just cite the sources that I cited, and skip over my contribution. It can be painful for my hard work to become irrelevant so rapidly.

2) Multiple of my writings have been plagiarized on Wikipedia by careless editors over the years, and I have been subsequently accused of plagiarizing from Wikipedia. That is unpleasant.

For a recent example, in 2006 I wrote an article about Doble Steam Cars[1]. A few months ago I had reason to visit the Doble steam car Wikipedia entry[2], and as I was reading, I realized that a large portion of the text was an uncanny, nearly verbatim copy of my article. I looked at the revision history, and found that a wiki editor had copied my text to revamp the article just a few months after I wrote mine in 2006. I visited /r/wikipedia and asked how to best handle this, and the Wikipedia editors there determined that it was indeed a violation, and they decided to revdelete almost 20 years of edits to purge the violation. It was quite something to behold.

To be clear, I am not happy that the huge revdelete resulted in so many lost subsequent good faith edits. But it's impressive that it was possible to roll it back so quickly and cleanly.

[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/the-last-great-steam-car/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doble_steam_car