> It's hard to give proper references then. He obviously would have mentioned the book itself.

I mean, yes, that's a completely valid citation. That is what they should have done. Instead they created some story about how it was a power-user 'protecting their article' (which was entirely untrue).

I've seen plenty of people use obscure books for references. I've even checked some of those references and have had to mark the usages as incorrect because they misinterpreted the citation.

The simple thing is that the person who reverted the change may or may not have been a 'power user', but the revert had nothing to do with it 'being their article', they explicitly told them (twice) why they reverted it, and they explicitly requested that they add a citation.