> Maybe we should just opt for a simpler system and resign to the fact that the end result will be worse.
How do you know that the result will be worse? What do you even mean by worse? One of the symptoms of an unhealthy monopoly is that the established powers refuse to experiment, lest they lose their dominant position. Attempts to depart from the status quo are met with alarmism and doomsday scenarios, and existing rules and procedures get romanticized to absurd ends. When a community is ailing, its cherished processes should be the first to be questioned. Deletionists might have had a noble purpose when they began their crusade a few years ago, but now that they wield an enormous amount of power over other contributors, I cannot think of them except as part of a self-perpetuating unhealthy monopoly over editorial power.
Rules like "Thou shalt not put up ads here" and "Thou shalt use proper citations", even if no less complicated to apply in the real world, at least articulate clear ideals that people can understand, and provide concrete guidelines that new contributors can follow. The less abstract the rules are, the less room there is for abuse.
I meant that if there was a change that involved a trade-off between process complexity and article quality[0], we shouldn't tend towards article quality at all costs. I meant that maybe a lower article quality is worth it if it means being less byzantine, less harsh towards the newbies, more flexible, etc.
Of course if you can avoid that trade-off, if Wikipedia can be any or all of these things without a drop in quality -- and I'm sure it can be although I don't know how -- that's even better and we should implement that first.
[0] You're 100% correct that "worse" isn't well defined here, and "high article quality" is not much better.
Why does that remind me exactly of this:
Listen up! The first rule of Tautology Club is... http://xkcd.com/703/
Notability, the Wikipedia term, is not an input to the article inclusion/exclusion process, it is the output of this process. The process itself depends on the topic and relies on various proxy metrics because notability (the English word) relates to an abstract concept which you can not meaningfully discuss directly.
Notability is a technical term on Wikipedia. It's a mistake to interpret it as the common English word or concept. It's also not all that subjective: When defined for all possible articles, notability is necessarily extremely abstract. However, notability is being refined and re-interpreted for specific areas in a community process. I'm not always happy about this process, and I certainly don't agree with its results in all cases, but that's a different issue.
It's this process that matters. There has to be some process to determine whether an article gets included (though extreme inclusionists may disagree). For this process, Wikipedia:Notability is the constitutional law, the individual Wikiprojects' notability criteria are the law derived from the constitution, both of which are applied to specific instances, in a system with a rich body of case law and with various bodies for arbitration.
In a way, it's more useful to think about notability not as an attribute of an entity, but simply as a short verdict of the current process. In other words, a thing is not notable enough to get its own Wikipedia article, but rather the fact that it got included and remained included makes it notable according to the technical meaning of Wikipedia.
Of course this is complicated and of course there are horrible downsides of having such a complicated system. Maybe we should just opt for a simpler system and resign to the fact that the end result will be worse. However I doubt that people would herald the new inclusionist Wikipedia where everyone's dad can get an article, instead they'd mercilessly pounce on the new Wikipedia full of spam, self-advertising, non-referenced, non-verified, non-sensical and attack articles.