Grok

Source: https://grok.com/c/252e02af-1b86-4bf3-bacb-ad1eefd82842?rid=a8161535-a02b-41a2-950c-b9602b6b9e4f

Wikipedia is not contradicting the corrected version. That sentence is an old textbook analogy for a rigid body, not the general conservation law.
Wiki’s actual conservation statement, a few lines earlier, is the usual one: angular momentum is conserved if there is no external torque. The rigid-body line is introduced as “a rotational analogue of Newton’s first law,” sourced to Crew (1908) and Worthington (1906). In that narrow setting it is fair:

A rigid body has a fixed mass distribution, so a single ω\omega (about a suitable axis) is meaningful.
No external torque ⇒\Rightarrow L⃗\vec{L} constant ⇒\Rightarrow that uniform rotation continues.

“External influence” there is 1900s wording for external torque, not “any force” and not “stops being rigid.”
Two things that sentence does not say:

Conservation applies only to rigid bodies.
If the object ceases to be rigid, L⃗\vec{L} of the system is no longer conserved.

Wiki immediately uses the ice skater—who is not rigid while pulling her arms in—as the standard example that LL stays the same while II and ω\omega change. That only makes sense if the law is about the system of particles, rigid or not.
So you can keep your description and treat the Wiki quote as a special-case slogan:

Rigid body + no external torque →\rightarrow it keeps spinning uniformly.
Any system + no external torque →\rightarrow total L⃗\vec{L} is constant, even if the object deforms, breaks, or turns to dust. The coherent “block rotation” can vanish; the sum ∑r⃗i×p⃗i\sum \vec{r}_i \times \vec{p}_i does not.

The original claim (“conserved unless … it ceases to be a rigid body”) is still the part that overreads the analogy.

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Archived URL: https://grok.com/c/252e02af-1b86-4bf3-bacb-ad1eefd82842?rid=a8161535-a02b-41a2-950c-b9602b6b9e4f

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