As a longtime Wikipedia contributor (like that and a quarter could even make a phone call if there were still payphones around), this does point up the strange and sometimes very thorny role of “editors” on Wikipedia. If you have an article that nobody has bothered to create for all these years, you run a serious risk of having it shot down by J. Random Editor for any number of reasons. Most popular is “notability,” but also, “lack of citations.”
Thing is, a submitter has no idea who the rejecting editor is, or, as we used to say when I was young, “who died and left them boss.” Rather than say, “well, this article seems well-written and has some meat behind it, let’s let the community build on it for a while, and if it still lacks merit in a year or so, gun it,” they tend to delete first and ask questions later.
I offer no good solution, just observing that the current method is suboptimal.
