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 And in the same sense, it makes no sense to try and apply the same standards and policies from an outdated legacy media format to an entirely new media format.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.
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 And in the same sense, it makes no sense to try and apply the same standards and policies from an outdated legacy media format to an entirely new media format.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.