Well, I basically agree with you in principle, Andrew. I love to find a page where someone has posted insightful research. I love to run it through web.archive.com for posterity and cite their work with links to the live page and the archived one, crediting them, and summarizing what they've published, WHILE ALSO making inline citations to the sources they cited in the Wikitree profile, so that the Wikitree profile is complete in its own right, and the next person who comes along can go straight to the sources instead of navigating a series of links to other sites that themselves cite the sources (which may or may not link to a digital version of the source).
It's a nice feeling to know that we're working out the details of the lives our forbears lived, together-ish, building on each other's work.
In practice, though, I've never seen that insightful research business happen (not in my work or others) when it's coming from an ancestry.com tree or a familysearch.org tree, or especially a Findagrave profile. Sometimes someone will do fantastic work digging up unindexed sources and linking to them -- and that is tremendously valuable -- but never have I seen either of those sites serving in any form that would make it sufficient to just link to a one of their pages and say "here is true insight, and there is no need to put contemporaneous sources in Wikitree." You can barely get a word into an ancestry.com profile, and the familysearch ones just don't really get used much, even if someone has linked a bunch of great and difficult to find sources in one of the profiles.
What I do see, in practice, is people linking from one site to the other, with no commentary, no analysis, just one essentially unsourced page citing another essentially unsourced page (this seems to happen most often with Findagrave, I think), almost as if to establish some veneer of credibility for unsourced assertions as to relationships/dates, just because someone else is also making the same unsourced assertions.
And once that's been done, it take MORE work by people who really care about evidence to undo all of this spaghetti of "ancestry.com says" or "Findagrave says", to lay bare the fact that nobody has published an actual source. You have to send them a PM, or write a comment on the profile, negotiating back and forth just to get to the point where a profile is making assertions based on evidence and not making assertions that are not.
So, I've spent more than my allotted 2 cents now, and I think I've stated (or over-stated) my case. Cheers!
