Seriously right? smh. The frustration from that is where my HN username comes from if anyone is wondering...To this day there's no real alternative encyclopedia that is a legit competitor to Wikipedia unfortunately.
Have you ever tried to make a page? Like genuinely tried to make a page? Not spammed them with bs. I am not bitter because I couldn't spam them with low quality nonsense. Just the opposite actually, I am a longtime Wikipedia editor. I love the site to be completely upfront (contrary to my username), but their notability guidelines is mind bogglingly frustrating. They've deleted pages I've tried to make for local ice cream shops, ma and pa stores that have real stories (and real citations!), and local investors/entrepreneurs who might not be as famous as Mark Zuckerberg but are notable. It's maddening when you're work gets deleted. I've given up making newer pages and let the higher ups do it and just improve the pages once they are fairly mature. There are no real alternatives to Wikipedia with the same altruistic base vision unfortunately. The only notable sites are RationalWiki, Everipedia, InfoGalactic, and Wikia (if you can really even count that), but all of these are a mere fraction of a fraction as big and reputable as Wikipedia, so back to them I keep going (and back to deleting my articles they continue to do).
Even a page [1] made by Jimmy Wales himself was deleted 22 minutes after creation [2]. It was later undeleted and nominated for deletion again, sparking a rather lengthy debate [3].
> They've deleted pages I've tried to make for local ice cream shops, ma and pa stores that have real stories
A line has to be drawn somewhere though. Storage may be cheap, but every article represents a maintenance burden in the long term. Hence the notability requirement. Why would a local investor/entrepreneur be notable to a global audience?
An in-depth article on your local ice cream parlour seems more at its place on a local blog, or on Wikivoyage under the 'Eat' header, or a book about your town; perhaps even a town-wiki!
> They've deleted pages I've tried to make for local ice cream shops, ma and pa stores that have real stories (and real citations!), and local investors/entrepreneurs
Are those things really notable? I think you're overvaluing things that are only relevant to you. It sounds like what you should be doing is creating a wikia or mediawiki for your city, county, or state.
I did. It's still there. Not a super-prominent one - couple of hundreds visits per month - but useful I think.
> their notability guidelines is mind bogglingly frustrating
Notability is a frequent point of contention. I don't think there's a good final way to solve it - people are interested in different things, and some things - e.g. local businesses - are notoriously grey area and prone to both abuse and over-zealous policing. I am sorry your experience was bad, but maybe try to contribute in some less controversial area? There are tons of areas - especially in translation space - where a lot of articles about completely non-controversial topic and very prominent things and people are under-covered.
