I guess you can frame it however you want. My main takeaway is that Wikipedia is completely opaque to someone who has a specific concern about something, but isn't already a committed contributor and insider to the community.

If you're of the opinion that Wikipedia should be an insular community, than maybe they should be more honest about it, disable anonymous edits, and save everyone a lot of time. If you think Wikipedia should be accessible, well, it isn't, and that should be fixed, too. Either way, there's room for improvement.

I think that, when it comes to deletion, Wikipedia _shouldn't_ care about the opinion of people who aren't "committed contributers". Why? Well, even if the article is undeleted (or not deleted in the first place), it still has problems with it - otherwise it would never have been in danger of being deleted in the first place. Someone needs to fix those problems, and that's much more likely if a "committed contributor and insider to the community" is advocating for it than if some random person on the internet with zero edits to their name leaves a drive-by Keep comment.

In other words, deletion isn't just about notability - it's also about gauging whether the article will be maintained. Wikipedia's procedures, while sometimes rather obtuse, serve as a first-pass filter to help gauge whether people who are Serious About Wikipedia will actually take care of the article (and of course, even if you are a person with zero edits to your name, reading up on wikipedia's procedures is a good way to prove you might actually care enough about the article to take care of it after it is undeleted).

I will admit that the user messaging feature is _awful_ however. Wiki format is not the right thing to use for a point-to-point conversation.

Explain how so many dumb people can become so adept at navigating Wikipedia's processes in between shifts at the gas station and 17 hour Farmville jags, and I'll concede that you have a point.

Mediawiki, and Wikipedia's incarnation of it in particular, is outmoded and obtuse. But it's not hard to do things on Wikipedia. If anything, it's too f'ing easy.

I don't know why you're demanding that I explain a claim I never made and don't agree with.

I'm not communicating well. I'm saying, "sure, Wikipedia's UX is clunky, but it obviously does work".

You should read downthread; other people have taken a closer look at Danny Sullivan's real experience working with Wikipedia's processes. This isn't a good case study to make a stand on. Give it a few weeks; Wikipedia will inevitably do something genuinely dumb we can get outraged about. It appears not to have here.

That's just the old "success forgives everything" argument. It's a tempting argument, but that's also the primary mechanism by which success leads to failure. Wikipedia works, and is completely usable, by committed and dedicated nerds. Maybe even the dumb ones that work at the gas station.

Yeah, this guy was probably wrong, and this particular subject probably isn't notable. Wikipedia still could have given this guy a better experience in the process of figuring this out, and writing this guy off as worthless and not worth listening to is just arrogant and unproductive.