Have you tried adding an article recently? I haven't had any trouble with my additions in a while. Some years ago there was a lot of deletionism, since there were still people like Larry Sanger around who thought Wikipedia should be a smaller, more traditional encyclopedia. In the past few years I've been occasionally writing articles on a variety of things, and nobody's complained, as long as they're well-referenced. I wouldn't say I'm a very active editor, either; probably 2-3 articles a year, so it doesn't require doing it constantly. I pick a topic (most recently, a Greek archaeological site), find 3-4 good references in, in this case, archaeological journals or monographs, write an article, submit it, and that's that. I haven't found a need to get approval from an Archaeology Cabal or anything. People sometimes come by and fiddle with the article's formatting to make it fit some kind of standard (adding infoboxes, etc.), but I haven't had unfriendly reactions.
The articles do have to be well-referenced, of course, since an article that doesn't cite good sources isn't very reliable. It also helps to pick things where you don't have a conflict of interest. Many of my fellow academics who run into trouble did so when they tried to write an article about themselves, or their research group, or one of their own projects (or worse, some kind of holy war they're involved in).