*I am surprised at the reaction to my "rant" above. Perhaps there *is* some hope left after all.
:User Balloonman seems concerned about whether I got confused by page moves and edits. Thanks for the concern, but my disappointment is not personal. It is about the, and decision-making process used by Wikipedia in general, and for this RfC in particular.  The process is irresponsible, because it is carried out without a clear and impartial cost/benefit analysis; and completely unfair, because the "voters" are not a representative sample of the editor community, the list of alternatives is biased and badly presented, and "consensus" is decided by a subjective evaluation rather than by a vote tally.
:Lack of representativity would not be a problem if the "voters" were selected for their wisdom and prudence; but instead they are invariably a small minority which has special interests in the issue (typically, people who helped write a new rule or standard).
:Predictably, this decision process has resulted in a huge and growing mass of guidelines, mechanisms, standards, and other features that are having a terrible effect on the project.  I have a long list of such "nonsensus" features, bu twore 
:Meanwhile I have found Ikip/Okip's [[User:Ikip/Sausage|much more extensive collection]] of "consensus" polls (I can see now why he is hated so much) and [[http://travel-industry.uptake.com/blog/2009/09/04/bullypedia-a-wikipedian-whos-tired-of-getting-beat-up/|McKenna's Sep/2009 article]] ''Bullypedia, A Wikipedian Who’s Tired of Getting Beat Up''. The latter makes my rant smell like rosewater, but it seems that an [[Wikipedia:Newbie_treatment_at_CS|actual experiment]] has basically confirmed its claims.
:As for myself, I have sort of learned how to fly below the deletionists's radar, but even so I was recently bitten. It was an article that I had written several years ago, on alternative theories for the peopling of the Americas.  I hadn't looked at the article in years, but it was not a BLP, it was duly sourced, it was notable, and it had been edited by other people in the meantime. The article was nominated for deletion on '''December 27, 2009''' and killed on '''January 2, 2010''', before I had a chance to even see the nomination.   It is too bad that the Wikipedia etiqette prevents me from exposing my opinion on all the esteemed colleagues who cooperated on that deletion, including those who invented the AfD mechanism; and on the profession of their honorable mothers.  If I had not invested so much time already in this @!#$pedia, I would probebly have kicked the bucket right there.
:Many readers have appended their comments to Mckenna's article, including a few wikipedians. Some of the latter attempted to justify the bullying reported by McKenna and others as mere application of the [[Wikipedia:Notability|notability rule]].  That is a bit like defending the Holocaust by quoting from German Nazi-era racial laws. Folks, the notability rule is not an excuse for bullying: its a prime example of it!  It was created and passed (in the usual "WP consensus" style) by a handful of deletionists, to give themselves the brass knuckles they needed for effective bullying.
:Another interesting comment was
::"[Wikipedia is] wonderful for useless stuff. Except that fascist editors are removing the useless stuff. The not-so-useless stuff? I’ve yet to see a decent article. So, essentially, this means Wikipedia has become a parody of itself. No more adding ‘not notable’ things, and unable to improve existing ‘notable’ things because vigilant idiots are vigilant."
:Some of you may remember the the explanation of why ''The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy'' sold much better than the ''Encyclopaedia Galactica''.  Wikipedia is still cheaper than the ''Britannica''; but it now has "Panic!" written all over its pages, and whatever little it still says about the Pan-Galactic Triple Gargle-Blaster may soon be deleted because it fails the latest notability guidelines for interplanetary cocktails (oops, dear deletionists, please forget you read that!)
:Which suggests an intriguing alternative theory to explain why Wikipedia seems to be run by bullies. I wonder, said Miss Marple, whether those gentlemen who tag articles and hang around the AfD might not perhaps be ''Britannica'''s employees? 8-)
:User Fram claims that the placement of the {{tl|unreferenced}} tag was left free initially, but 10,000 editors chose to place it at top-of-article and so the rule was made after the fact. Sorry but that is not what I see. Taggers were and are still a minuscule minority of the editors; the vast majority of the 10,000 --- including the creators of all those articles that got tagged --- do not tag, and do not want that tag ''anywhere''.  Top-of-article prevailed simply because the robot-assisted taggers opted for it (which happens to be the easiet choice to program). I doubt whether those taggers ever considered the placement "optional": a couple of times I tried to move it to the talk page or bottom of page; it was promptly moved back and I was bluntly told to stop such "disruptive" editing. 
:Speaking of which, my image of an editor who inserts "unreferenced" tags is a janitor who, instead of scrubbing the floor, goes around the building spray-painting on the walls 'NO [[spittoon|SPITTOON]] IN THIS ROOM. ADD ONE OR ALL THE FURNITURE WILL BE BURNED' - and abuses anyone who tries to remove the request without complying with it.  You must agree that the fellow is doing very important work, since a room without a spittoon may have untold amounts of spit on the floor, and anyone who slips on it and breaks a leg could sue the skin off the landlord.
:User Fram also proposes "warm applause for our 10,000 editors who find the time, inbetween their social networking, to create 1200 articles a day". Applause should go indeed to those editors who are still creating, and hopefully that is the majority of the 10,000.  But it seems that all applause is going instead to a few hundred social networkers who are most active at tagging and deleting, and giving each other barnstars --- not for helping to build the barn, but for tearing down what other folks just built.
:User Peregrine Fisher writes "that's how WP works and you can't change it". Better say "that's how WP fails to work".  And yes, I may not be able to change how WP "works": but it *will* change soon, one way or the other.
:Judging by the [[Wikipedia:Modelling_Wikipedia's_growth#Two-phase_exponential_model|new article rate]], until the end of 2005 or so the pool of editors was doubling every year, just as the number of articles. At that time we had perhaps 17,000 regular editors and 1 million articles, or about 60 articles per editor.  If growth had continued at that rate, we should now have at least 500,000 regular editors and perhaps 30 million articles --- but still a rate of 60 articles for each editor.
:Instead, the editor pool has since '''shrunk''' by some 40% to 10,000, while the number of articles kept growing to the present 3 million. So '''now we have over 300 articles for each editor, or five times the ratio we had in 2005'''.  Considering that half are stubs and almost all the rest are only rough drafts, I would guess one printed page for each article on average. So, today each regular editor is implicitly responsible for single-handedly editing a 300-page volume of our encyclopedia. That includes inspecting every casual edit that gets made to it, and bringing it from "half-written rough draft" to "barely publishable" state: write the articles and sections that are still missing, satisfy all redlinks, flesh out the stubs, etc.  Given the current "nonsensus" decisions, that includes, in particular, providing at least one acceptable reference for every fact stated in those 300 pages.  
:If the present trend continues, the ratio will keep getting worse: . A few years from now we will reach a point where the regular editors will no longer be able to fight negative edits like vandalism and ad-spam (which, unlike positive edits, have not abated since 2006). 
:Forget the "always a work in progress" cliché.  Soon Wikipedia will be like an abandoned construction site, an unfinished skeleton with gutted roof and broken windows, filled with grafitti and garbage and inhabited only by vandals.  Who would want to contribute good contents to that wrecked project? Who will want to waste their time maintaining it? Who will donate money to keep it running?  
:What is the cause of this disaster?  Who should be blamed for those 490,000 "lost" editors?
:Well, there is plenty of evidence (like McKenna's testimonial and the "simulated newbie" experiment) pointing the finger towards '''editor bullying''' --- including robot-assisted rude tagging and paranoid "non-notable" or "unsourced" deletions.  Bullying may not be the ''only'' cause, but it is definitely a contributing factor that is doing a lot of damage.  I found no statistics on the number of otherwise valid articles that were deleted for "non-notable" or "unsourced" reasons alone, but "hundreds of thousands" seems a safe guess.  That probably means hundreds of thousands newbie editors who were given a "prison's welcome" on their first attempt to create an article. 
:In conclusion, Wikipedia will soon change, in spite of all shrugs and so-whats. If it does not change course now, radically and quickly, it will just die in a few years.
:To save itself, Wikipedia must set as its top goal the recruiting and keeping of new bona-fide editors.  That includes banning every unnecessary practice, rule or feature that may drive those editors away, no matter how dear it may be to its inventors and users.  That includes, in particular, scrapping the notability rule, deleting all related article-side tags --- and stopping this paranoia about usourced BLPs.
:The about-turn should also include undeleting all the articles that have ever been deleted for notability alone, and emailing a contrite apology to all the editors who worked on them.  If that can bring back a few hundred "lost" editors, it will be well worth the cost.
All the best (with a bit more hope)


:I hereby accuse the Wikipedia deletionists --- namely all those editors who uphold and enforce the so-called "notability rule" (also known as "criterion A7"), as well as those editors who have inserted "unsourced" and other similar tags in articles: of making unverified or knowingly false statements about the alleged dangers of non-notable and unsourced articles; of rigging elections so as to bias the voter upturn in favor of their parties; of intentionally misleading colleagues by falsely claiming their personal choices as "official" and "consensus" Wikipedia rules; of defacing hundreds of thousands of public articles with editorial tags, in blatant disregard to Wikipedia's constituional principles; of harassing, demeaning and intimidating hundreds of thousands fellow editors;  of exacting forced unpaid and unthanked-for labor from said editors under threat of summary deletion; of using automatic and/or lethal administrative weapons against unarmed ordinary editors; of denying ordinary editors their constitutional rights to undo and dipute harmful actions directed against them and their articles; of holding tens of thousands of A.f.D. trials in the absence and ignorance of the defendants and their counsels; of committing several hundred thousand counts of first-degree murder of valid articles, many of them mere day-old infants; of absconding the mortal remains of said articles and deying any access to them, even by their progenitors; of blatant discrimination, based on arbitrary and unjustified personal prejudice, in the deletion or retention of articles about persons, institutions, locations, events, and works of art, both real and imaginary; of [[:File:Jim Wales Tim Tam 03.JPG|bribing high judicial officers with cookies and milk]] in order to escape just and deserved punishment; of continued, emphatic and insolent denial of any harmful effects of their actions in spite of their documented knowledge to the contrary; and, finally, of long-term conspiracy to destroy the Wikipedia Project for vain personal motives.  I urge the Wikipedia community as a whole to ponder these crimes and take whatever measures are necessary to prevent them from happening again.