Wikipedia isn't one big giant article, where the existence of marginally noteworthy elements distracts you or diverts your attention. The articles that get deleted by the little notability hitlers are contributions with no cost incurred by anyone, save the trivial storage space.
It's like saying some guys tripod page that you never visit is somehow cluttering your experience of web browsing.
I wish they'd err on the side of leaving stuff alone in the 1% of cases where it's not black and white (like the obsolete BBS software example)
Godwin, and wrong on the merits, as well.
The stuff that gets deleted is the stuff that can't be verified, which means there's no way to fact-check it. It isn't about storage space or clutter: It's about not having stuff in there that can't be verified.
Wikipedia is nothing more than the biggest plagiarist / content farm on the Internet. It isn't scrutinized because it has been grandfathered in.
Wikipedia is the ebaumsworld of information. Completely unreliable. Steals credit, traffic, royalties from the content creators. Policies focused on self preservation rather than serving a public good or respecting creators.
The delicious irony of your hatred is that your point is so poorly argued, you must be a wikipedia editor.
I'm actually a pretty accomplished wikipedia editor with several original article credits. The articles are standing today. I have barnstars and everything. But I actually submit my articles to Encyclopedia Britannica now, because I realized the truth about wikipedia. It's just a really low quality content farm that can't be trusted on anything.
What is the point of getting your knowledge from unreliable losers? All the biggest wikipedia editors are no-life losers with zero respect in any real intellectual community. They are divorced from the community of experts and receive nothing but scorn from them.
What's the point of reading an encyclopedia written by people who you can't rely on? Getting 80% of the content right is not an achievement--every content farm on the internet does the same--from eHow to expertsexchange.
Wikipedia is just an ideology and volunteer driven low quality content farm. Due to Wikipedia's overpowering marketing/SEO, when Wikipedia writes an article on a topic, that Wikipedia article will now have higher visibility than the original information source that it scraped and now cites. The Wikipedia article will steal traffic from the original source.
The internet would be so much better without content farms. And Wikipedia is the worst of the worst.
When I feel like writing an encyclopedia article, I send it now to Encyclopedia Britannica. They've edited my writing and incorporated parts into their high quality encyclopedia.
By the way, that study that said that wikipedia was just as good as Britannica was complete bullshit--as flawed as your informal fallacy that you just shat out right above this comment.
Deletionism is the reason it's worth using to begin with. It prevents it from being flooded by crap and allows it to stay on mission. Not everything has to be all things to all people.