Good point, except the the irony is the reverse of that. I think that many observers would say that the Wikipedia system works quite well considering they are

Good point, except the the irony is the reverse of that. I think that many observers would say that the Wikipedia system works quite well considering they are one of the most widely used sites on the Internet. Since this article is published on Wikipedia, it would seem an ironic disproof of the article's contents that the publishing platform uses the very strategy that is claimed to be an anti-pattern. I would go a step further and suggest that the technique listed uses the relational database such so that in the end it is more like a columnar database, although I have to think about that further before I feel more sure.