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.

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.

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.

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