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.