Note also that the centralization point is not necessarily true. On one hand, yes totally, the process of gathering knowledge is centralized on wikipedia.org . Although, it's not a place where original content is welcome, so it still links to the sources. I guess that if SEO is of concern to you, being linked by wikipedia probably have some value.
On the other hand, my usual way of reading wikipedia is by browsing localhost. All data of wikipedia is open (you can actually download its database) and under creative common, so it's perfectly legit to host it on your own computer - quite the opposite of centralized, in that regard.
Of course, using the whole database with the whole history is not really practicable nor useful, on a local computer. Personally, I use the dumps generated by Kiwix, which only provide the last revision at the time of generation of the dump. I download them using the torrents provided by Kiwix and keep seeding them, so it can hardly be more decentralized, in that regard :)
I used to contribute a lot to wikipedia in its early days in the 2000' and faced the same frustrating experience. I think this just happens to everybody, from what I heard from other editors. I would expect it to be even worse now that wp is well established and editors do not have to make a common front against academics' denigration.
Still, wp is in my view easily the biggest achievement of the web, and I still care for it. I would often fix small issues, like you mention, this does not trigger any hostile response. Something else I found to work quite well to contribute without risking annoying conflicts : to translate articles from en.wp to other languages if their pages don't exist yet on the localized one. And of course, there always need help to revert vandalisms.
Also, I would recommend against having an account. Being IP based editor makes you more subject to scrutiny, but this prevents people deciding they don't like you based on your history. That's an advice I would give for any public discussion on the web, though (by always using fresh accounts).
A funny effect of this page : it seems to me that the discussion around it on HN is way less bitterly contradictory than usual. Well, that's my impression at least, I haven't measured it.
On the other hand, my usual way of reading wikipedia is by browsing localhost. All data of wikipedia is open (you can actually download its database) and under creative common, so it's perfectly legit to host it on your own computer - quite the opposite of centralized, in that regard.
Of course, using the whole database with the whole history is not really practicable nor useful, on a local computer. Personally, I use the dumps generated by Kiwix, which only provide the last revision at the time of generation of the dump. I download them using the torrents provided by Kiwix and keep seeding them, so it can hardly be more decentralized, in that regard :)