The tragedy of Wikipedia is that something like 3,000 people in the entire world are active editors (>100 edits)
Within moments, the article was deleted by a veteran editor who didn't consider the subject sufficiently notable. (This was apparently not an issue for the much smaller German, French and Japanese wikis.) My page was 1 of 5 pages he had deleted in the span of 15 minutes, which shows how much effort he personally spent on the decision to negate other contributor's work.
Needless to say, I doubt I will ever try to contribute to Wikipedia again.
EDIT: I was able to find the draft deletion over my lunch break! I have requested an undelete here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_undelet...
But this evening, I can just create the article directly. Not because I have any particular authority but just because confirmed users from a long time ago can do this. If the draft is undeleted, I can recover your work! If not, and you still want to, I'll send you a message when I create the article and you can add to it. Totally understandable if the last experience soured you on it and you'd rather not.
And maybe they are right: I understand that not all new contributions are valuable to the project (though you could argue that improving upon them is better than outright deleting them — obvious spam and vandalism excepted ofcourse). But you can't have it both ways: either you want to invite new contributors, in which case you need to be tolerant of their mistakes, and ensure that they are mentored instead of bullied by the more experienced users, or you choose to have a small group of trusted veterans maintain all articles. I don't think one option is obviously superior to the other, but it's a choice that Wikipedia doesn't seem to want to make.
There is lots of room for improvement here. For example, I get the impression that Deletionists now rule Wikipedia, so if a newbie like me tries to create a new article on any topic, there is a 90% chance it will just be deleted (because if the topic was worthy of an article on Wikipedia, don't you think someone more experienced had already created it by now, silly noob?)
If that's the case, then why allow people to create new articles at all? It's just setting up people to waste their time creating an initial draft. And it's an annoying gamble: I know that the more time I spend on making the initial revision really really good, the less likely it will be insta-deleted by some grumpy guy, but the more time I will have lost if it is! It's a real dilemma. Why make people gamble with their time like that?
If you accept that most new articles will not be accepted, wouldn't it be better to disable article creation, and instead have a form where people can suggest ideas for new articles? That way, you spare contributors the effort of creating the initial draft (which is actually really difficult if you're new to Wikipedia and you are trying to be diligent about creating properly-formatted references and info-boxes and so on), and on the off-chance that the people in power decide to allow the new article to be created, they could also pair up the new contributor with a more experienced editor who will mentor them and help them create an initial revision that's up to snuff. This strikes me as a process that's 1000% better if you want to encourage new contributions.
For my part, I am an occasional contributor with just a little more patience than most, some grandfathered rights, and a philosophical opposition to the erasure of creative effort. And about as much as I care about doing is repairing lost work so I'll try to get your article back because I think it should be there. I have no position of influence in this organization and have no desire to put in the effort to gain it to change it. But it's a commons. And I intend to modify the commons within my existing power.
I think if I had experienced what you had my position would not be different from yours.
Well, the article is a small stub. I'll try to work on it to get it fuller. The hard part for me will be finding sources since I don't speak Japanese very much and I don't read it at all. Anyway, I managed to restore your work so perhaps soon we'll be able to put it back in action!
You should be able to link Mersenne Twister back to him if you'd like to now.
I edit wikipedia casually.