Then the rest seems just a construct-ed rant.
Where's this coming from?
The paper examines "institutional" change of Wikipedia, showing how its content transformed over time from lending credence to fringe theories to actively debunking them.
This transformation occurred due to the ambiguity of Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View" (NPOV) guideline, which was open to different interpretations.
There were two camps of editors - the "Anti-Fringe" camp pushed for firmly anti-pseudoscience interpretations of NPOV, while the "Pro-Fringe" camp pushed for more neutrality towards fringe theories.
Early disputes over NPOV were frequently resolved in favor of the Anti-Fringe camp, empowering them while demoralizing the Pro-Fringe camp.
The Pro-Fringe editors gradually exited Wikipedia over time, leaving the Anti-Fringe camp with more power to reinterpret NPOV in an anti-fringe manner.
The paper suggests similar dynamics may drive change in other groups like political parties, social movements, bureaucracies, etc. Losers choose to leave rather than keep fighting uphill battles.
Neither the paper, nor the rant, mention one hypothesis for why academia's paradoxically groupthink radicalism may have an outsized or disproportionate influence on Wikipedia: the evergreen activity from teachers everywhere assigning "edit a Wikipedia article" to each new class of haven't yet experienced the real world students and the self-selecting cohort of those who see an outlet for an introverted form of activism that then persists for perhaps a decade among a subset.