As I discovered later, I was just lucky to hit pages that weren’t possessively controlled by one person or a small group who want to control the page with a tight grip. That’s often true for pages for obscure topics that don’t have much text.
Get into a more mainstream topic or anywhere near a contentious topic and your edits will be reverted, rewritten, or debated by someone with more free time than you until the text goes back to what they wanted to control. It doesn’t matter how much you follow the rules, you’re at the mercy of what that person or group wants the page to say.
This could be true. But I saw it in histories of not controversial pages also. Some people feel they own articles they contributed to. Wikipedia made a policy against this because it was a problem.[1]
> You notice they almost never actually link to the reverts they are complaining about.
I noticed they said it was years before nearly always if they said when. And to find revisions of forgotten date in Wikipedia required more time than most people would spend for a comment. And anecdotal evidence changed beliefs rarely.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership_of_content
It's absolutely fair that people aren't going to dig up old edits. At the same time, I'm not sure how relevant years-old anecdotal evidence is. It would be interesting to see some actual statistics on this; I guess the data is public, so it would be possible to do research on how often helpful edits are rejected.
unfortunately I was editing under my real name and I'd rather not dox myself so I can't link to the reverts. but the general area was in social choice / computational democracy. so if you scroll around the edit history of some of those pages maybe you'll get the picture?