Wikipedia writes that
You should not cite any particular author or authors for a Wikipedia article, in general. Wikipedia is collaboratively written. However, if you do need to find the list of authors of a particular article, you can check the Page history. Authors are listed only by IP address or chosen username; you normally cannot verify and often cannot even guess at their identities.
Is this not in contradiction with the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license under which individual authors provide content, though?
You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor
From what I understand, when I write text on Wikipedia I can specify a name under which I would like to be credited and a canonical URI for my work.
Is a link to Wikipedia sufficient to fulfil these obligations, even if the username of the editor is hidden in the page history behind several clicks? (And, also, the page history can be deleted?)
For another less contrived example about the "link-only attribution" being deleted: suppose I find an answer in a comment on Stack Exchange. SE content is also licensed under the same CC-BY-SA-3.0 license (or at least recent content). As good practice demands, I copy that text into a Community Wiki answer, and use a permalink to the comment as my only means of attribution. Later, the comment gets flagged as "no longer necessary" and deleted, so my perfectly legal means of attribution disappears forever. Who is at fault here?