Finally something somewhat informed (I gave some claps 👏). Well. I couldn't get to open most of the links you posted. So anyway. Maybe I'm reading the second one wrong but it compares 55 characters per line to shorter ones “This produced the highest level of comprehension and was also read faster than short lines”. I'm going to ignore the others because I cannot really read them.

I'm not arguing that people should use morbidly long lines. I'm arguing that in Wikipedia case this doesn't exactly apply. Now I wouldn't go as far as calling those people idiots. As a person with technical background I can clearly see why they'd fear every change. It wouldn't be a reliable product if they didn't. If you had as many users as Wikipedia has and the product isn't build around innovation but around reliability, you should fear every change. Because with millions of pages every change means there's a large potential of losing the reliability. And for example if you'd make one mistake it could break other things like Google snippets and other crawlers that you don't even have to know how do they work. It's much safer for the infrastructure to stay the same and reliable.

I've read the article before. There's nothing about the technical part of the issue. Nor there is anything about how actually people use Wikipedia and how would that affect them. Oh well.. Then.. I think I've learned things of two from this discussion. At least it wasn't all wasted time.