TL;DR Wikipedia has no defense against organized, bad actors. The institutional protection protocols are easily weaponized against unorganized and solo editors.

TL;DR Wikipedia has no defense against organized, bad actors. The institutional protection protocols are easily weaponized against unorganized and solo editors. My experience wasn't so bad. I was less irritated by the harassment and doxxing than I was by Wikipedia's reaction. While that crew's behavior was an attempt to intimidate, I was not really intimidated, but I was deeply disappointed in Wikipedia. Weird people gotta be weird, so I view them like the wind and sand, just part of the landscape. If I were to conclude that one whole class of people are bad because some people "supporting" them are bad, it'd be a bad conclusion. Every group has good and bad (and weird). Wikipedia for their part has pseudo-legalistic protocols and policies that are byzantine, contradictory and hard to navigate, rewarding invested troublemakers and discouraging ordinary volunteers. In my case, the crew dug into my contribution history, manufactured an accusation and threw it at the wall to see if it would stick. To my naive surprise and disappointment, their transparently harassing accusation was upheld. The admin literally looked at multiple instances of harassment and supported it. Was the admin colluding with them? Does not matter. Not a community I want to participate in either way. My conclusion from that experience is that, scratch the surface, and it's clear that Wikipedia as an institution has no effective defense against bad actors when - charitably - the thin line against are just solo, ordinarily volunteers like myself and a comparatively tiny full time staff. In a world of professional troll farms, all Wikipedia articles that have real-world political meaning, on the Holocaust for example, will inevitably have effective, bad acting editors pushing false ideological agendas, as we see here in the paper. They can and do weaponize the current policies cynically to push out opposing editors. It is an institutional problem and I don't see how it can be easily fixed.