There's another force acting in WP besides deletion: consolidation. In the early days it was harder to know about pre-existing articles on a subject. Multiple pages on the same topic and closely related topics were common.
For example, I discovered the other day a separate page for Reagan's NPR joke about Russia, "We start bombing in 5 minutes". Another example is subject timelines that are broken out into separate articles for each year.
"Notability" is an unfortunate choice for a criterion since it has a large component of subjectivity. There are many people who are only temporarily famous; many who should be (more) famous are nearly unknown - on Wikipedia, for example, technical people before the 20th century whose discoveries still positively impact our lives. Warriors of all ages, on the other hand, get more than enough attention.
The subjectivity of notability is, I think, a canard, and it's been tackled upthread from here. One thing I think you can't accuse WP of is of being vague about what "Notability" means.
For example, I discovered the other day a separate page for Reagan's NPR joke about Russia, "We start bombing in 5 minutes". Another example is subject timelines that are broken out into separate articles for each year.
"Notability" is an unfortunate choice for a criterion since it has a large component of subjectivity. There are many people who are only temporarily famous; many who should be (more) famous are nearly unknown - on Wikipedia, for example, technical people before the 20th century whose discoveries still positively impact our lives. Warriors of all ages, on the other hand, get more than enough attention.