The Problem with Wikipedia is that Wikipedia does not want to reflect truth, or reality or facts or objectivity however one might call it, but verifiability.
That is why they revert to false statements, even if they know so.
Insisting on verifiability is a necessary evil if Wikipedia wants to have even a modicum of credibility. Maybe the standards are far too stringent, but verifiability is tangible, and the 'truth' isn't.
And once one accepts that one can drop this stupid principle. For me it seems the only reason it exists is to pander the academic community. But it's a hopeless and one sided love.
It does not improve quality, it does not improve credibility, the best thing about it that is produces funny feedback loops.
Articles about NBA players are not a good example of this, but I can easily think of plenty of other topics which would involve extremely loud and opinionated fringe communities who are very motivated to broadcast their views to the world. I can't think of any way to limit the influence of these communities except by insisting that every article have impeccable sources.
The cost of this insistence on sources is that sometimes utterly obvious edits may be reverted unless they can be properly sourced, but I think it is an acceptable price for maintaining consistent standards of quality across the wiki.
Also, I don't agree that the system only exists to pander to academia. Every encyclopedia in the world has standards of quality to which their articles must conform. The only difference between these other encyclopedias and Wikipedia is the speed with which they are updated.
Now I don't know about you, but I don't go to Wikipedia to get the latest news. I go there to learn stuff with the belief that this stuff will be correct. I don't care if players' teams are updated hours instead of seconds after a trade. I care much more about whether this information is correct. Verifiability builds trust, and I don't see how Wikipedia could continue to exist without it.
Maybe WPs process (speaking as someone that's not edited WP here) need to change more towards the distributed VCS workflow: everyone can make changes, but changes gets voted in. Not sure if that is scalable either -- but perhaps what is need is a three-tier system: default to open (like any wiki, just make the change, done); somewhat moderated (anyone can suggest an edit, votes (with comment field) need to pass/accept the vote [essentially making the talk page a vote to pass/fail], and locked (protecting popular articles against spam, as today).
Or maybe what is needed is to accept that WP is "everone's wiki" (eg: it's a great source for tv series episode dates and synopsis -- not really something that should go in a traditional encyclopedia) -- in other words, classify some pages/sections as "not encyclopedia grade". It's hard to see how one can have one process that both accommodates NBA transfers, tv series episode synopsis, modern history of Palestine and Ukraine, and articles that document the current state of photovoltaics and quantum physics.
I notice you use --. Discussion around dashes is extensive. Here's just one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy...
That single discussion is around 15,000 words. Here's a search for some more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=dash&pre...
Note the search results helpfully give a word count - there are several hundred thousand extra words there.
Dash-discussion was not limited to the style guide and its talk page, or to the village pump. Disputes were escalated to ANI (a notice board where incidents for administrator attention can be raised); finally ending up at arbitration. (This is pretty severe level of dispute.) https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitra...
PEDIT: I mean, just look at the article talk for "Mexican-American War" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mexican%E2%80%93American_... - roughly 21,000 words.}
And that's about –,— and -. Now imagine how editors behave over contentious issues. (What are those islands called and who do they belong to? is a good example.)
Wikipedia stopped being an encyclopedia long ago: now it's just Bureaucracy Simulator 2015 with the AI cranked up to nightmare.