I agree that wikipedia deletes far too many things for dubious reasons and is becoming ivory-toweresque. Luckily, some wikipedians (wtf?) are trying to reform the deletion process and policies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_reform

I know I have personally seen articles deleted as 'not notable', when they in fact are because people relied on that they had not heard of it, that it did not show up on google (what is robots.txt? I DUNNO LOL), and alexia ranking (yeah, thats scientific!). In the same case, this article was speedily voted for deletion because it had been deleted before. However, since non-administrators could not see the old page, they did not know that it was a spam article whereas the new article was a legitimate one.

I think wikipedia is a decent idea, that has just been implemented and run incorrectly so-far. At least, it does not live up to how it is touted and described in reality.