[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.