Wikipedia actually has an article about it. They are mainly bothered by the unreadability of it. Editors can indeed bundle citations as you suggest, but it takes some manual effort.

Citation overkill is also a bit of a red flag for edit wars, or barely-notable things that someone really wants to have on a wiki page.

[–] Aqarius@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago

Yeah, no citations is suspect, 15 citations is usually well funded bullshit.

[–] Magrath@lemmy.ca 5 points 9 months ago

Seems like that may be able to be solved on the website side of things. Make the citations expandable, so they all look like one, click the plus sign to show them all.