Reading some about it can help understand the issues, though. I'm honestly surprised that an online editable general-subject encyclopedia works as well as it does, and I think some of that is due to having pragmatically come up with approaches that sort-of-work over the years. I don't think it's reasonable to have a very strong opinion on it without some knowledge of the problems various policies were intended to solve, and the pros/cons of different approaches.
A curious thing with Wikipedia is that lots of people think they know the obviously right thing it should do, but many of these "obviously right" things are very different from each other. For example, co-founder Larry Sanger split and founded Citizendium because he thought Wikipedia was far too permissive in letting "unencyclopedic" crap into the encyclopedia, which is the exact opposite complaint of the people who are worried about "deletionism". That is also probably the most common complaint about Wikipedia from academics and in the mainstream media. The mainstream media gets particularly inflamed if something incorrect is found in Wikipedia, like the "Seigenthaler incident", and demands that Wikipedia should institute stricter edit controls.
One area of particular interest to me is where to draw the line on science articles. With no policies on inclusion at all, there would by now be thousands of physics articles on concepts that are not recognized by the physics literature, created by the same fringe-science people who post prolifically on Usenet, and cited to their own websites as a source. They tried to do so on Wikipedia in 2003-04, and that was the impetus for some of the policies such as "no original research" and "must be verifiable in reliable sources". (Fringe physics theories that are well-known and where third-party documentation exists, such as Time Cube, can of course still be covered.)
> Fringe physics theories that are well-known and where third-party documentation exists, such as Time Cube, can of course still be covered.
But only as fringe physics, which is where another great big bunch of ill-will towards Wikipedia is from: Even if your pet theory gets an article, it isn't going to be treated the same way as Quantum Electrodynamics. Most of the citations will be to the reliable sources, which are by the people who think you're a crackpot. This causes a lot of pain to the people who insist 'NPOV' means 'Treat my nuttery like it was a real Grown-Up Person science'.
This is rather a broad brush, and a gross oversimplification of a complex debate that's been going on for a long time.