Would you mind saying what the topic of the article you started writing was? Also, did you do it in a sandbox on your account page or just out in the open?

Without more context your statement creates an extremely biased view against Wikipedia.

Why is it a extremely biased view against Wikipedia? I just stated exactly what happened, when I tried to make a new article. Now, you can argue that I shouldn't just start making an article, but that's another discussion.

I started writing an article about 'C++14', the new C++ standard. I was writing a nicely referenced list of the new features which have already been voted into the standard, when a box popped up telling me there was a conflict, as someone else had wiped the page clean. So I threw my text away and left wikipedia again.

Looking at the revision history of the page - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=C%2B%2B14&act... - your contributions were not deleted, but were merged into the main C++ article by another contributor. Other articles about individual C++ standards already redirect there - see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=C%2B%2B98&red...

I think your experience suggests that Wikipedia's tools are not as user-friendly as they should be to new or inexperienced editors, rather than that contributing to Wikipedia is useless, because your contributions will be deleted.

That's a problem though, it got merged in as a blurb, but the article itself hadn't had a chance to be fleshed out (where it could've been enough to justify its own page) after just a few minutes.

I think you're supposed to use a Userspace draft for such purpose: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Userspace_draft

That said, I only know about them by chance.

Interesting. Just tried making up a page and saw a bulleted list of info at the top.

  You can also start your new article at Special:Mypage/Erlang++.
  There, you can develop the article with less risk of deletion,
  ask other editors to help work on it, and move it into "article
  space" when it is ready.

That points out the userspace pages. However, it's not loud enough. If the risk is so high of deletion/merging in short spans (minutes), then this should be the preferred and well advertised method of creating articles.

So actual collaboration to create content should take place outside of the context of the canonical wiki, and the wiki itself should only be used for quasi-final drafts? How is that consistent with the nature of a wiki?

What, exactly, is the problem with having work-in-progress articles present in the main wiki? What argument is there for delitionism other than some obsessive-compulsive desire to hold the wiki to some arbitrary standard of orderliness?

I agree with you, my point is merely if the deletionist types are so fast that it's actually a problem for new content (that the Wikimedia Foundation has made special notice of it), then they need to resolve it. Either ensure new pages receive a grace period, or come up with a clearly marked draft area. The grace period is my preferred solution, 8 minutes is not nearly enough to determine that a particular article should be a one paragraph blurb and not an honest to god entry.

Apologies; I'd thought you were saying that userspace was the appropriate setting for in-progress articles, and that this simply needed to gain widespread knowledge.

But I think the "grace period" idea scarcely scratches the surface. Is it better if the article is given time to mature before it's deleted entirely by people dogmatically adhering to some arbitrary criterion of notability?

If Wikipedia is to remain a useful resource and to realize its unique potential, deletionism neesd to be vigorously suppressed. If the current Wikipedia culture is too far gone, then perhaps it needs to be forked and maintained in a culture that regards the fact that enough collaborative effort was made to produce a coherent article as itself sufficient evidence of "notability".

True, I did miss that. At some point I started glazing over reading that block of text at the top of the page.

While there may well be good reasons not to, I have long been surprised wikipedia has not moved to all new pages living in a starter section, until they are ready to be promoted to the full site. Multi layering would also give somewhere for less well researched topics to live.

I would note, I specifically sought that information. It blends into the background very easily. If it's really their suggested solution to a problem in their community, they need to make it more obvious or the default for new page creation.

But that's not exactly a "final" decision - if the section grows, it can easily be factored out into its own article again.

With any dynamic process, an individual snapshot (or even a few) might not be representative of the larger outcome or trajectory.

I understand it's not final, but it's offputting to novice contributors, and the promptness (literally minutes in this case) means that the contributer will be left confused (in this case thinking the content was completely deleted). Even if this speed is not representative, that it can happen will turn people away. How a community presents itself is incredibly important to growing it. Since that's a goal for the Wikimedia Foundation it's something they need to actively work on improving.

True, I could save my text, and try to merge it into the much larger and older C++ page. My suspicion is that such a large addition to the general C++ page would not last long.

And that, right there, is the ratchet function which has shut the door on wikipedia.

Insiders can quickly undo anything. They are familiar with the tools and the procedures.

You might have contributed for the rest of your life. That potential stream of valuable contributions is now lost to wikipedia, potentially forever.

Now compound that over every single expert to whom so much was promised by the interface, and from whom the promise was removed by wikipedians.

Bingo.

I just experienced this myself merely days ago.

No details. Just a well formed, minor contribution to an article that was insta-deleted because of "notability".

Which was news to me because, while I am aware articles themselves need to be notable, now some folks are enforcing notability on subsets of articles. In this case, a single row in a table listing like items.

Meanwhile, for every object ever drawn in an anime, that anime MUST be mentioned in the article for the object. Because this is notable content, you see...

Wikipedia, 2030: "The Holocaust was also mentioned in episode #22 of Robot Cheerleader Girl, where Tanaka-san fell headfirst into a bucket while giving a speech about it."

Which article?

I see no mention of C++14 on the site of the C++ committee: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/

Where is there an official mention of the name C++14?

There are mentions in the public ally available meetings of the C++ committee.