> There are enforced rules about citing sources
There are articles with no citations that have been lying there and accumulating dust for almost ten years.[0] I wouldn't call that "enforced". And when you bring the verifiability policy at deletion debates, sooner or later someone will inevitably say "the policy says the article has to be verifiABLE, not verifiED" or other such nonsense. Bring in enough users like that and the only sort-of-working cleanup process on Wikipedia grinds to a halt.
And let's forget that while verifiability policies require sources to be "reliable", this word isn't defined anywhere. Which makes the definition bendable to the whims of users at hand, as long as nobody else notices. The result is predictable.[1]
> the history of any page can be checked
Giving very little useful information, as I wrote before. And what does it matter if it can be checked? Who actually does it?
> there is discussion for just about any page
Oh yeah. Like the over 40 thousand words written over whether to capitalise a preposition, which only stopped after Randall Munroe drew a comic which called it out as an embarrassment to the project.[2] (And I don't even like the guy.) And no, it's not just a singular example. Disputes like this arise all of the time; Wikipedians have dutifully collected them into a list[3], from which of course they refuse to draw any conclusions.
The discussion pages are often a liability rather than an advantage. It's easy to understand why those prolonged discussions happen: one, because they tend to concentrate on colour-of-the-bike-shed issues like this, and two, because nobody has a final say on any issue. You win discussions on Wikipedia usually 0) by inviting your friends to support you, 1) by making passive-aggressive remarks just stingy enough to annoy your opponents, but not enough to constitute overt, actionable personal attacks, and 2) by playing silly word-games with policies to twist them to your will. (Of course, there rules do exist against all three, but see point 2.) This shall render your opponents outnumbered and/or too tired to argue any further, at which point you just wait for an administrator to declare consensus in your favour. Of course, it is easy to imagine what kind of people can afford to employ these tactics effectively: PR agencies and OCD sufferers with lots of free time.
> Errors are often fixed as soon as they are discovered
Which can be as late as 10 years after being introduced, and after careless writers have incorporated those errors into their own work, as happened with Jar'Edo Wens. Counter-vandalism patrol only looks for overt hooligans, not fraudsters. While traditional publishing makes errors harder to introduce in the first place.
> As for anonymity the author of most content may as well be anonymous. Other than the most famous authors or most learned readers the author of any given data is generally not of interest for practical use.
So page histories are useless after all? Is it not true that "we can investigate it and readily determine who the malicious or incorrect actors are"?
> Since we are using wikipedia as a source, for maximum irony here is the page on wikipedia about the reliability of wikipedia:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia
> It cites 240 sources, including peer reviewed journal Nature and panel discussions of specific domain experts.
I think you've mentioned sample sizes somewhere in your comment... didn't you? What does one article being ostensibly well-referenced prove? Can you trust the article to be actually supported by those sources? Never mind that single Nature study, which you're no doubt referring to, used rather questionable methodology and is seriously outdated at this point.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_lacking_sour...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:All_articles_lacking_...
[2] https://xkcd.com/1167/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:LAMEST