"I don't get why they would do this to so many topics."
Self-promotion and non-notable content.
Pretty early in Wikipedia's existence all sorts of spammers and non-entities realized that they could use Wikipedia as their personal advertising billboard.
Lots of things that (arguably) don't belong in an encyclopedia have been added to Wikipedia too. For example, you could, arguably, have an article about every one of the 7 billion people on the planet and about what foods each of them like, etc.
Inclusionists might like all such articles to be included, but to the extent deletionists are effective, articles on non-notable subjects are deleted.
Lots of things that (arguably) don't belong in an encyclopedia have been added to Wikipedia too.
Wikipedia isn't an encyclopedia though, not in any traditional sense. Just because they use that word in the byline doesn't mean that it makes sense to pretend that Wikipedia is a 1980's door-to-door-salesperson bound edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. And in the same sense, it makes no sense to try and apply the same standards and policies from an outdated legacy media format to an entirely new media format.
but to the extent deletionists are effective, articles on non-notable subjects are deleted.
The problem with this mind-set is the idea that there is some objective, universally applicable idea of what it means to be "non notable". There isn't.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and the fact that you think it could or should be something else doesn't change that.
Wikipedia doesn't claim that there is a universal objective definition for "notability". "Notability" is a term of art on Wikipedia. You can't win this argument with a dictionary.
There may be nothing in the world a true Wikipedian would rather do than explain the project's definition of a word like "Notability", at ponderous, relentless, unceasing length. So ignorance is no excuse! There's more documentation for this concept than there is for Postgres. RTFM, friend.
If you don't like Wikipedia's rules or think it could be something more, you are welcome to fork it.
Looking at some deleted articles [1], I do get it. There seem to be hundreds of articles of asteroids which consist of only a few sentences. A lot of small or already defunct startup companies, small indie-bands and their albums etc.
There really are limitations to the amount of time the core editors and administration have to devote to it though. Even if they could keep on top of the blatant spamming and self promotion and nutty theories and articles created purely to harass, if you have an order of magnitude more pages you have an order of magnitude more pages that can get out of date, be vandalised, be total bullshit etc.
Because a digital encyclopedia is still an encyclopedia rather than an archive of everything (which is a different and useful thing as well and also happens to exist in various forms).
This is like a discussion the other day on streaming service quality. Even if the "crap" isn't completely without value to anyone, dump 100,000 low quality/value pieces of content into anything and it's that much harder to find (and trust) the good content.
Apart from too much noise a lot of it is duplicated effort as well. E.g. Cherry RC is indeed deleted but so it can be a redirect to RC Cola which already talks about it. Letting those exists just serves to dilute the quality of the articles on the topic even though the overall article count is higher.
Take a look through what is deleted, it's mostly junk. In my experience Wikipedia could stand to be more aggressive with its pruning. Low quality articles waste your time because you have to read them for a bit before you realize it is worthless.
It's worth noting that Wikidata has far more inclusive standards than any Wikipedia, though it still excludes true vanity submissions. Many of these deleted items could get a Wikidata entry if they don't have one already.
The only times I've felt frustration looking up things and finding them deleted was like some minor god from mythology of which there likely wasn't much written as there isn't much known anywhere TBH
> This organization is only mentioned in connection with its famous founders, Hunter Biden and Christopher Heinz, from whom it cannot inherit notability per WP:NORG. Every single source is a trivial mention in an article about the founders; that means it fails WP:GNG as well. Keeping it around additionally risks WP:BLPVIO, as this is a magnet for conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden.
Seems pretty clear cut to me. Write the parts that deserve to be in the Hunter Biden page in the Hunter Biden page. Don't make a stub article just so you can mention an otherwise unnotable company.
Nobody is posting their “thoughts” on Wikipedia, it's for encyclopedic articles. By controlling the content of those, you control what many people consider the truth.
An encyclopedia is by definition curated and controlled. The brilliance of the Internet and open content licensing is that you can fork Wikipedia if you don’t like their editorial choices. This wasn’t possible with a thirty-volume print edition of Britannica.
Of course if you want to make people look to your version instead of the one at wikipedia.org, you probably need to invest in marketing. In theory nothing stops you from becoming the new source of authority — after all Wikipedia has only held this role for less than twenty years, and nobody remembers what was the #1 result site for these search queries then.
