[bpeebles]

I'd say its hard to start as a new Wikipedia editor if you only goal is to make article X or make huge changes to article Y that is somewhat controversial. On the other hand, if you start in Wikipedia by doing simple edits in non-controversial subjects (which does improve Wikipedia, and thus, the Internet given how many search engines just scrape Wikipedia for search results), start making making some new articles in notable things that are also not controversial, then you can start understanding how to get controversial (but correct) things added and changed. Yes, that takes longer and is more work, but at the same time, similar to open source software, you have to spend time learning how to code and how to make valuable and correct PRs to make major overhauls to heavily used software.

[lucideer]

This comment would've been mostly* the case a number of years ago - and describes a sane, measured approach to editorial control.

It has changed. There are users with scripts running to detect any additions that don't fit their model, no matter how uncontroversial. It's become difficult to contribute even on the most boring of topics.

* I say "mostly" because the funny thing about controversial topics is that it's often the contributors (rather than "deleters") that possess the greater amount of persistence in pushing the content they want added and kept. So very politically loaded subjects will suffer from the opposite problem, resulting in sprawling trees of linked articles on a subject, each a huge bulk of prose wrestled through numerous talk page threads of PoV objections.

It's the normal/mundane stuff that gets summarily deleted and forgotten about forever.

[psyc]

In other words, shithead humans took over, took control, and made sure it works like every other dull shithead archaic human organization in history. And the deletionists can say they aren't because there's no such thing, because WP was never "meant" to be that, it was always "meant" to be this, this way is the only one feasible, and we've always been at war with Eastasia.

Victors rewrite history, and now the article about it too.