If you're learning linguistics from wikipedia maybe check out "prescriptivism" and see how many contemporary mainstream linguists work within that framework for native speaker usages.
How does prescriptivism interact with wikipedia? Since wikipedia can (in the ideal at least) be edited by anyone, I'd expect it to match common usage more closely than a normal encyclopedia.
It is useless because it is nitpicking. But still, descriptive rules for a language can still be pretty specific and complicated, so even if we toss out all prescriptivism that won't free us from corrections I think.
