aka people with lots of time and a desire to have power over something

Sigh, no. They were complying with Wikipedia's stated rules, which require a secondary source rather than a primary source. The historian was using solely primary sources (trial records). The idea is to use sources that can be easily verified due to broader accessibility. Once that historian published his book on the subject, that was an acceptable secondary source, and the article was changed. This is an example of Wikipedia arguably having a bad rule, not of the editors being overzealous, power-hungry, and illogical.