I don't see that the link to Wikipedia is not "citing the people who wrote the stuff you're using". When you cite a scientific paper, you give the primary author (or few) and an "et al.", you don't list out everyone who contributed to the paper - you're still crediting them all and if people care, they can go look up the rest.

OK, I'm not really sure what the relevance of this is.

I was just responding to this: "...am I expected to cite every contributor? That doesn't seem reasonable."

And saying how it sounds pretty reasonable to me. If you say that a Wikipedia link counts as a cite then that just makes it even more reasonable.

I think people are using words sloppily. I think everyone agrees that the information should be available. I'm growing confident no one thinks that every contribution needs to be enumerated in situ, and beginning to suspect that no one thinks they actually need to be enumerated separately from the Wikipedia article (unless there are contributions not represented in the Wikipedia history). At which point, I don't think there's any real disagreement here.

I had interpreted your statement above as "Oh, of course go ahead and include a link to Wikipedia - they deserve credit too - but still redundantly list out every contributor to the Wikipedia page". This is because above, I think with the "...am I expected to cite every contributor? That doesn't seem reasonable." the author had in mind enumeration, not simple reference.

I'm just saying that you should give attribution either directly or in whatever substitute way the authors accept. If Wikipedia lets you just link to the page, great! If they wanted you to list out the contributors, well, do that. If that's an unacceptable burden for your case, don't use it.

I think I agree with that, though I'd personally encourage creators to be sufficiently liberal in acceptance of substitutes to allow lightweight use of massive collaboration.