I'm far removed from Wikipedia's social/cultural realm and yet I've only ever heard negative things about the deletionist culture there. Is the deletionist rationale that fewer articles == fewer spots for vandalism to occur?
I think people had a hard time taking Wikipedia seriously when there were more articles about Wookie culture and light sabre colours than there were about chickens or water. So, the deletionist culture seems to be about pride, focus on the serious business so that Wikipedia can be taken seriously and have a better reputation.
Perhaps, but it's also a database and it doesn't really hurt anything. We can point at pretty much any article and find a strange influence of geek male culture all over the encyclopedia. "In Popular Culture" (which I think is now supposed to be removed from articles) all too often simply contained links to video games and obscure anime.
Personally, I find the shift to wikia troubling. Mainly because it came down from Jimbo to purge the articles and move them to wikia, which ahem Jimbo runs and profits from.
I don't think it is clear that there is really a deletionist culture.
There's 5 million English articles. Even a very high quality bot will make hundreds or thousands of mistakes if it is doing anything vaguely interesting across a broad swath of articles.
Which doesn't excuse having a crap process at the margin, but nor does a moderate volume of unfortunate experiences make the case that it is all falling apart.
I think it's a bit confusing to equate deletionism with something done by bots?
The most infamous exchanges are almost all about active, human users seeing an article (possibly flagged by a bot), putting it up for Speedy Deletion, and steamrolling people who support keeping it.
The more pernicious approach, related to the one detailed here, is that articles are "pruned" for quality (removing e.g. external links sections) and then deleted for being incomplete.
My experience and reading certainly suggests that Wikipedia has a problem (as confirmed by new editor and article counts), but it largely seems to be about disparate groups aligning harmfully. Some people want to remove external links, some people want to fragment large articles into more focused sub articles, and some people want to delete everything that's excessively narrow or short on content. As a result, each faction does its thing and the end result is content moving from "good and comprehensive" to "deleted entirely" by several innocuous steps.
