That said, I've just fixed the history page so that the deleted edits actually appear, even if you can't read the material in them.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hemovanadin&diff=... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hemovanadin&actio...
I did my time as a Wikipedia editor. I've watched others do it, too. It's exhausting. You end up obsessively checking your watchlist multiple times a day, then every hour, then multiple times per hour, because you never know when someone will get you in their sights. And then you have to be prepared to obsessively watch talk pages and project pages and noticeboards 24/7 to be ready to come back in and copy/paste sources and arguments and the appropriate WP:IMEMORIZEDWIKISPEAK links over and over and over again to try to defend something. And even then you probably won't succeed.
Wikipedia is eating itself and is smugly proud of it. The effort involved in creating and preserving a piece of worthwhile content is orders of magnitude higher than the effort involved in deleting it, and people who get stuff deleted also get rewarded for doing so, while people who create and maintain get comparatively very little recognition. Eventually Wikipedia will have only two articles, someone will propose merging them, and them someone else will speedy-delete the last one for breaking various rules. And that'll be the end of it.
> Wikipedia is eating itself and is smugly proud of it.
Oh yes. The smugness cannot be underestimated, and in some ways is the worst part of the whole process.
That's why I've just restored the edits and revision-deleted the (copyrighted) text, leaving the editor and edit summaries public!