There is a very bad trend in Wikipedia, which slowly is killing the project: eager purists.
An eager purist reads existing articles and removes every trace of anything he does not consider "encyclopaedic" or "interesting" or about anything that he is too stupid to understand the value of.
The eager purists are like vandal vacuum cleaners, who slowly drain Wikipedia of any trace of anything useful in the blind belief that they contribute something when they remove what they do not understand.
This kind of New Vandals believe that even statements that are obviously correct when pointed out, are original research that needs to be referenced.
The New Vandals accept any obscure website as reference, which they proudly hold up as a proof that a something is true.
The New Vandals remove text rather than improve it.
The New Vandals believe it is possible to produce texts that a reader shall be able to trust without any critical mind. This is obviously wrong, but it could be a harmless stupidity, if it had not been for the fact that the New Vandals remove all text that is not 100% correct and undisputed, which most of the time means 100% of all written text.
The New Vandals do not do this in one clumsy move, but constantly strip Wikipedia of the worst 10%, so just the 90% that is best remains, forgetting that 0.9^30 = 4%, so if they were to succeed with their goal every day for a month, Wikipedia were to shrink to 4% of its initial volume. It they were to succeed for a year, Wikipedia would shrink to 0.000000000000003 % of its initial volume, which roughly corresponds to the single letter W - or a part of it.
The New Vandals do everything to discourage people with limited writing skills from contributing with vital facts by removing them.
After having seen what the New Vandals do to contributions, who would sit down and spend time to write an full article on their own? You can do it, but it may be removed without a trace by some idiot, who not only is unable to grasp its value, but also thinks that this lack of understanding of his empowers him to vandalise and remove.
The New Vandals waves with the "guidelines" as powerful swords against the feeble attempts of other editors to think for themselves. The New Vandals efficiently block all thinking with references to the "guidelines". The sacred "guidelines" can pretty much be described with Zinovyev's phrase about convictions: "A man with convictions is rigid, dogmatic, tedious and, as a rule, stupid."