Comment by KarlKemp

Having started to occasionally edit stuff on Wikipedia over the pandemic, I have a newfound understanding of the reasons for deleting stuff.

As a casual user, you will, by definition, tend to see the most-trafficked, well-maintained pages. Deleted pages, as a general rule, are not those. Your impression of the level of quality that can be achieved is completely off. This is also true if you read a lot in some specialized subject that has a small, but active and productive community (some pop culture fandoms, for example).

Leave the beaten paths at your own risk, especially if it concerns anything that has small communities with differences of opinion. Like foreign wars.

Example: this page about some soldier in the Balkan wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Milan_Tepić&oldid...

This isn't the worst I've seen, but something I remembered because I tried to clean it up recently. It includes a long discussion that has little to do with the subject, is obviously the product of a tug-of-war between opposing POVs and fails to present the subject in a way that would allow the reader to come to any conclusion. Or, at least, I still have no idea if this guy is a war criminal, hero, or both.

And this is the stuff that doesn't get deleted.

The other standard is obviously self-serving content, i. e. articles written by the subject or the subject's employees/PR people etc. There is simply no way to deal with the fundamental problem that an article's subject always has far more interest in an article than any random editor without limiting the scope to subjects that attract at least a few interested editors without a conflict of interest.