I've seen that happen a few times, an expert in a field will greatly improve an article, only to have their additions removed or butchered by someone who's far less educated on the subject. The resulting edit war is "won" by the person better versed in Wikipedia's policies, and that's usually not the expert.
The bureaucrat wins, the article gets neutered, and the expert gets so frustrated they never participate in Wikipedia again. To me, it seems like Wikipedia loses more than it gains in this.
And my point is: it's not. The phenomenon you're describing is in fact healthy. Subject matter experts should in fact not cite their own authority when writing in an encyclopedia. They're almost certainly right, whatever they're writing, but that's not the point.
I understand the "no original research" policy, there needs to be verifiable sources. What I don't get is the tendency to discourage experts from writing about the subjects they know the best. I'd much rather have someone who is "almost certainly right" have the final say on an article.
Of course, verifying that someone actually is an authority would be a huge ordeal in itself...
The discouragement experts get on Wikipedia is being forced to cite --- to Wikipedia's standards --- points that they would not need to cite in their own writing. They're used to writing for their peers, with much of what they have to say being accepted common knowledge. That doesn't work on WP, at least not under scrutiny. For an expert, writing on WP is much more tedious than writing anywhere else. A Wikipedia editor goes in expecting the exercise to be about organizing citations; a subject matter expert goes in expecting the exercise to be about (say) science communication. The subject matter expert should write articles that WP cites, not WP pages.
What I think people miss in these arguments is that Wikipedia is about the citations. It's a directory of sources. If it says something important, that thing needs to be footnoted to something readers can go find and read directly. That is the point.
I don't have an example handy, but I disagree that Wikipedia is about the citations. It _should_ be about the citations, but I often come across pages (usually medical/health related) that have citations where the Wikipedia page says something completely different from the source that is cited.
If Wikipedia were about the citations, I would expect to see a larger effort in verifying that page content reflects what the source says.
They fall short of their goals all the time. I'm just saying: (1) they're clear about what their goals are, and (2) they're sensible goals. And, it's hard to argue with a project as successful a sthis.
The bureaucrat wins, the article gets neutered, and the expert gets so frustrated they never participate in Wikipedia again. To me, it seems like Wikipedia loses more than it gains in this.