In reading about this I came across a few things that I honestly wasn't aware of for Wikipedia, which made me feel these deletionists are even more silly than I prior thought
The Notability guidelines often both me really, as they are a somewhat silly set of 'rules' in many ways and not everything fits into a nice and tidy system. For example, Christopher M seems to feel that his understanding of the requirements if that all languages must be cited in well published and cited academic papers and there is no other way around it. That's just silly. There could be new and growing languages that are of importance, or older ones that were important at the time, but that there weren't papers for and aren't being actively used. Do they each have a purpose and for the people who is researching things via the Wikipedia important? Yes. They are.
I feel that there is more to be lost by most deletionist activity than there is to be gained. The risk evaluation here almost always (except in cases of spam and self edits, which are frequent) should lean on the side of having more information available, not less.
The one thing that has always blown my mind on Wikipedia is that they have "votes" all the time where people edit in their opinion, but then a decision is made which may or may not take the votes into account. They're actually pretty clear on this: there's a policy that says something to the effect of "yeah, we'll take votes, but the person acting on the vote doesn't have to listen to the votes because Wikipedia isn't a democracy. You're lucky if we read the votes and take them into account!".
They are not "votes", and the rules are pretty clear about that. The goal of wikipedia debates is to discuss and achieve a consensus, which doesn't work at all when people turn individual debates into anti/pro-deletion flamewars, appeal to outside websites to rally the troops, who then arrive and restate the same tired old arguments (eg. lack of storage space) instead of actually reading the rules and being constructive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not...
The Notability guidelines often both me really, as they are a somewhat silly set of 'rules' in many ways and not everything fits into a nice and tidy system. For example, Christopher M seems to feel that his understanding of the requirements if that all languages must be cited in well published and cited academic papers and there is no other way around it. That's just silly. There could be new and growing languages that are of importance, or older ones that were important at the time, but that there weren't papers for and aren't being actively used. Do they each have a purpose and for the people who is researching things via the Wikipedia important? Yes. They are.
I feel that there is more to be lost by most deletionist activity than there is to be gained. The risk evaluation here almost always (except in cases of spam and self edits, which are frequent) should lean on the side of having more information available, not less.