[user49598]

It dissapoints me to think about how much legitimate human knowledge has been wiped from WP

Then it must absolutely enthrall you to think about how much human knowledge is made available by wikipedia. You can be just as persistent as a "delitionist", theres nothing stopping you. It doesn't mean the system is broken just because some people are passionate about it.

[bane]

It does enthrall me. But as time goes on, and the deletionist issue persists and becomes ingrained and is continuously ignored by WP and the Foundation, I can't help but think how much wasted potential is out there.

[user49598]

Did you downvote my comment because you don't agree with it or because you think it's non-constructive?

[danielweber]

I didn't downvote you, but "if you don't like someone else's edit, edit it yourself" comes down to who can afford to spend more of their life babysitting Wikipedia.

I thought that line of reasoning was completed years ago. Yeah, the people who are more willing to waste their life on Wikipedia policy pages will win. Now, what are the bad effects of that?

[user49598]

Talk pages. If you have a problem with an article bring it up on the talk page. I don't see how else you could expect a free, user-edited, online encyclopedia to function.

For what it is, wikipedia is incredibly effective. If you don't care about wikipedia policy, how can you care about the exact content of wikipedia?

[ars]

It used to be I would check the color of the talk tab, and if there was text there I'd go read it.

Then someone had the idea of putting a template with the "importance" of the page in the talk page. So now every page has a talk page with text, and I never check them.

It used to be I would ask questions in the talk page and get an answer within hours, now I'm lucky to get an answer that year! (Not exaggerating.)

The amount of content that has been lost by vandals changing text to garbage, and then someone comes and removes the garbage - but doesn't revert the edit, is staggering. I think it's time to auto-lock virtually all old pages, require a second opinion on every edit.

[user49598]

Vandalism is a bummer, but it's certainly not a reason to loose faith in wikipedia. "Staggering" loss of content is an enormous exaggeration, especially since the articles are versioned and the versions are easily comparable.

[ars]

Unless you go searching in the history you'll never even know about all the missing content.

And yes, it is staggering, I am not exaggerating given that I've personally restored quite a number of pages - some of them have sat completely gutted of content for a year.

[lmm]

There's no easy way to get, or even become aware of the existence of, an articles deleted as "not notable" or similar.