All agree they want to keep some standard of quality in Wikipedia, they just disagree on the method and threshold for deletion.
Just be aware Wikipedia is not a single hive-mind :)
I find it really really rude and disrespectful to just trample over other volunteers' work like this. I'm all for deleting crap, but outright deletion instead of offering suggestions first and then being super-defensive when asked "hey, what's up?" Yeah nah, that doesn't fly. It's like just closing people's PRs on GitHub without offering suggestions on how to fix the patch first with just a single line of "doesn't fit code standards", "doesn't work on Windows", or just a link to a lengthy page.
Guess everyone is too busy fighting over capitalisation of movies titles or whether or not the Stanley Kubrick article should have an infobox to offer meaningful suggestions to new users shrug.
On Wikipedia, the biggest asshole with the most persistence wins. They've deluded themselves in to thinking this is "meritocracy".
I find Wikipedia articles on technical/science subjects tend to be higher quality (with some exceptions of course), those on history tend to be so-so, those about current political matters tend to be outrageously one-sided, and those on pop culture matters are often hilarious -- an article on a subject related to anime can be a lot longer and more detailed than one about real history!
Back in the olden days I remember there used to be a Wikipedia article about vampires, written from the point of view of someone in the "vampire community" who wrote about them as if "vampirism" was a "lifestyle", and when it got edited/deleted of course these people threw a fit. But this was a clear case of garbage that doesn't belong in a general encyclopedia.
Contributing to Wikipedia, especially in topics where there is controversy, is very frustrating. Like you said, the person with the most time or clout with the online community tends to "win". Having lots of rules of the form WP:<this or that> in order to overwhelm you and make you give up can feel very tiresome. This is why I don't contribute; I simply don't have the time for it.
Still find Wikipedia immensely useful though. I'm glad it exists.
Well, not really. I'm mostly a "treat people's time with respect"-ist. The biggest problem I have is not so much with deleting as such, but rather that for some this seems to be the first tool they use once they see something that they think is not a good fit. Not everyone in the deletionist camp is like that, but there are quite a lot of them and you will run in to these people sooner rather than later.
I've saved more than a bit of content by just copy/pasting the deleted content somewhere else (instead of a separate article), or just by Googling for a few extra references.
Another experience I had was watching a video on YouTube from Japan where a guy was brewing coffee which reminded me that the brand of the coffee equipment used in the video is sometimes sold in coffee shops in Europe. I wanted to know a little bit more about the company so I went to Wikipedia - the English page got deleted because there was little information about the company on the English speaking part of the Internet. This does not say anything about the company (which seems to be hugely popular in Japan and certain social circles in Europe), rather it demonstrates the limit of the model Wikipedia uses for curating the articles.