I'll be perfectly honest with you, until the Wikimedia foundation steps in and straightens out the embarrassing charade that the community editorial process has become, I know that not only will I personally not be wasting my time trying to contribute to wikipedia, I won't be donating either (no matter how doe eyed Jimmy gets) and I'll be trying to get as many other people as possible to follow suit.

It's unrealistic to expect the foundation to edit all the individual content, but they need to manage the processes. As they are, it's virtually impossible for anybody not already part of the circle-jerk of WP editors to provide any meaningful contributions. The jargon density alone in dealing with anything other than the most basic edits make most people quit immediately.

And no, starting up yet another discussion over WP:N is not going to solve the problem - that's a bigger losing battle than trying to keep a page for Alice ML alive. The foundation simply needs to step in and say "this is how it's going to be" and fix it.

Here's my 3 step solution for what it's worth:

1) AfD's are initially silent -- meaning nobody knows that an article has been flagged. An article needs at least a dozen AfD flags to spark a deletion process. The deletion process needs to be similarly fair, anonymous and automatic. That means secret ballot, long periods of consideration and discussion (not hours, more like months)...in other words, it needs to be a serious deal to remove an article from the site. AfD flags should disappear after 48 hours if no action or discussion has taken place and the default should be to keep the article.

2) Wikipedia needs to eliminate the class of editors completely from the site. Editing powers are given out to outright assholes who pretend to be operating in good faith but really just operate on a power trip. Users may only edit some fixed number of "things" per month. WP is dominated right now by people with literally nothing to do in their lives except spend 16 hours a day policing wikipedia. WP should not be encouraging this type of obsessive personality by giving them power over the community. I can say definitely, 100% of the problem that people have with WP is with these kinds of editors.

3) No single admin may pull the delete trigger, if the secret ballot shows a positive deletion assertion, it needs a panel of 3 admins to confirm. The process to reverse a deletion should be simple and similarly free from the personal whims of overzealous admins/editors.

WP:N needs to either be fixed, or go away. Despite being a guideline, editors treat it as a hard and fast rule that is paradoxically applied completely arbitrarily to individual pages. The guideline is so broken that it would probably only result in a wikipedia containing short snippets of common/popular knowledge if applied across the entire site -- basically what Zed calls "things my grandmother knows about". This completely defeats the purpose of a reference site. People come here to discover new information, not confirm what they already know. If anything, it should be harder to put a page up of highly notable things than long-tail things.

It's not that trying to contribute to wikipedia is inconvenient, or that it's jargon is unnecessarily dense, it's that it fucking sucks to try and be a positive force to expand wikipedia. It's painful, it's no fun, there's literally no reward, and hours and hours of work can poof! go away based on somebody's whim.

It used to be fun. I used to contribute things. There used to be useful and helpful discussions on every page, trying to make them as high quality as possible. But then people started to figure out that it's easier to just delete entire articles that contains a single typo, or where the writer hasn't pulled together all of the references yet or the subject hasn't risen to whatever arbitrary interpretation of WP:N that some random admin is using that day. Rather than try and improve the article, or help find the references, or help establish notability, poof gone goes the work.

And that's been going on for more than 5 years without any apparent movement by the foundation to fix this broken problem. It's not a technical issue (though I agree with Zed that much of it comes from the lack of a '/') it's a policy problem that the foundation needs to address.

edit I think I'll probably be checking out http://www.wikia.com/Wikia as a replacement for wikipedia. It looks like they have a much saner process on the surface.