I'm sure someone could do a whole graduate thesis on that question, or any of a million other questions about how Wikipedia works. Wikipedia is evolved, not i

I'm sure someone could do a whole graduate thesis on that question, or any of a million other questions about how Wikipedia works. Wikipedia is evolved, not intelligently designed. It has a million behaviors that few can explain clearly-- some are historical baggage, others have critical subtle interactions. There are historical reasons for sure-- e.g. relatively early in WP's history there were a number of editors that mass created all sorts of quasi-random articles using automation. But are there good reasons to keep doing it? Dunno. Maybe someone more active than I has a better idea. If the meta of wikipedia is interesting to you, you might find these notes I made for a talk I wrote in circa 2008 or so which addresses why WP's behavior is often kind of inexplicable to humans and why that isn't a problem or at least why it's not avoidable: https://people.xiph.org/~greg/zen.wp.txt https://people.xiph.org/~greg/zen.wp.txt