You've almost got it, except:

> Wikipedia has a bunch of languages that were used by like one person, because there is published material on them

No. It's more like, there are plenty of articles on Wikipedia that don't meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines AT ALL, but when you write an article on Wikipedia and enough time passes without anyone noticing that the article is poorly sourced, then eventually the tendency of Wikipedia community is to just keep it.

This is what has led to the what-about-ism regarding Odin's deletion - there are lots of other programming languages that also don't meet the notability guidelines, yet, to this day, still have Wikipedia articles.

Could someone come along and propose deletion for such articles? Yes, of course. You yourself could go do that right now, if you want. But nobody's getting paid for such work, so someone has to want to. The tendency of Wikipedia editors is that, when an article is many years old, they would rather flag it for improvement rather than simply throw away years of fellow editors' work. Whereas an article that's brand new is likely to not have much work put into it, and also more likely to be self-promotion and/or spam.

This is very frustrating for people who create Wikipedia articles and have them deleted. "You mean, whether or not my non-notable article gets deleted or not is just the luck of whether someone comes along and notices that it's not notable?" Yep. Like I said, nobody's getting paid for deletion work.

> The tendency of Wikipedia editors is that, when an article is many years old, they would rather flag it for improvement rather than simply throw away years of fellow editors' work.

That's not been my experience, tbh - in my view the deletionist fraction of the editors has essentially "won", if one can put it in those terms. I _think_ there is a (maybe small) group that have decided it is their mission to guard Wikipedia against what they view as cruft or non-notable, regardless of how many years of work these articles may have accumulated. They do not need to be paid for this - they enjoy it. Destroying is always easier than creation.

I seem to recall some study showing that the vast vast majority of edits/deletes on Wikipedia are the work of just a few hundred long-standing editors (citation needed) - which to me confirmed my gut feeling that most new editors bounce off and give up on contribution in short order.

I contributed for a few years, but gave up eventually - it was exhausting to spend time collating sources, collecting information, editing, rewriting, and then having someone come along and propose discarding your work with very little investment from their side.

Stackoverflow has gone through similar calcification - it's nearly impossible to contribute now, or build reputation as a new user, as posts get closed as duplicates or not-relevant.

>Like I said, nobody's getting paid for deletion work.

Actually there are organizations -- several of which brag about it openly -- that employ people to carefully manage what ends up on Wikipedia, and which side of a story ends up in popular articles.

Seems like Wikipedia sucks at enforcing its policy from what I am reading?

There has to be a better way to do this at that scale than just "oh we forgot to notice it and now its too awkward to remove it"? Maybe i am missing something idk