Wikipedia is dying. Not from the issues described in the big userbox to the right, which are mere symptoms for the most part. Wikipedia is dying from a terminal illness called deletionism – and there is no cure.

The original mission of Wikipedia was to collect and preserve the sum total of the world's encyclopedic knowledge, where "encyclopedic" simply refers to excluding those things explicitly specified by WP:NOT, so that Wikipedia remains an encyclopedia instead of a database of source material.

Unfortunately, over time this has been reinterpreted as essentially regurgitating information provided by sufficiently "mainstream" sources, and only if said information conforms to an extremely narrow vision of what an encyclopedia should be at that. In other words, Wikipedia is becoming little more than an updated, electronic copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica or similar. It is as if WP:NOTPAPER does not exist, let alone exist as policy.

Wikipedia does still have a relatively sensible set of notability guidelines, mainly because substantial edits to all policy pages get reverted unless there is a very clear consensus to make them. But how these guidelines get interpreted at WP:AFD is an entirely different matter – there, whoever happens to be present for the discussion carries the day (that is, if the closing guidelines are followed appropriately, which in a small but increasing number of the most controversial instances is not the case).

However, AfD is far from the biggest problem – at least there is some sort of process there (albeit a rather poor one as a result of Wikipedia:Perennial proposals#Rename AFD not being implemented for supposed "technical reasons", despite actually obtaining consensus!). Because Wikipedians have repeatedly rejected any and all sensible proposals for Wikipedia:Moderators, when content is removed from an article for such spurious reasons as misinterpretation of WP:NOT there is simply no reasonable means of reaching an agreement to put it back. Nobody is going to start a WP:RFC for that, because nobody participates in article-specific RfCs anymore unless the article is on a very major topic.

What generally happens in content disputes of any sort now is one of two things: either one of the editors just quits the debate, leaving the other to keep or delete the content as they see fit – though in this case it often gets deleted by another user much later on; or one of the two editors gets blocked for edit warring, despite that being prohibited by Wikipedia:Edit warring#Administrator guidance – once again leaving the other editor to do what they want on the issue. (This issue becomes far more pronounced when one of the editors involved is anonymous, in which case the page is often semi-protected, which unambiguously violates WP:SEMI. Ironically it is often clear that said IP users represent the views of Wikipedia's readers far more than the established users edit warring with them do.)

To be clear, I do not identify as an inclusionist. I do tend to join mostly controversial AfDs, where an article can in some cases be rescued from deletion with a single additional opinion to tilt the balance of the discussion just enough for a "no consensus" close, so I do mostly !vote "keep" or such. But I have !voted "delete", or similar, plenty of times – in at least one recent case the article would almost certainly not have been deleted had I not joined the discussion to point out serious issues with it, and in another recent instance I changed my opinion from "keep" to "delete" between successive AfDs for substantially the same content. However, especially after one has contributed so much to many of the most obscure articles, where in some cases even the sources used would no longer exist had they not been added to Wikipedia and thus archived by the Wayback Machine just in time – obviously one tries to do everything reasonably possible to ensure said articles do not get deleted.

It is painful to see one of the greatest projects of our time – arguably in history – go down like this. And as I mentioned at the start, I do not see any feasible solution to the problem. Even if such a solution does exist, as more and more of the editors who focus on creating content as opposed to removing it leave (or are forced out by a hostile community) because of the issues just described, the chances of it ever being implemented become increasingly remote.

Deletionism has "won" the ultimate edit war: that over keeping Wikipedia itself alive. Needless to say, that does the ultimate disservice to Wikipedia's readers.

P.S. I wrote User:Modernponderer/On consensus over 5 years ago now. Wikipedia's culture has changed so drastically even since then, that essay might as well be marked "historical".