> Why didn't they just do that in the first place?
Because they didn't find any. If secondary sources don't seem to exist, then there's no hope to begin with. Someone else found them, and that instantly made it clear that it's fixable.
> they did some cursory Googling, then suggested it for deletion - with a deadline of 7 days:
I fail to see the problem here, unless you have a problem with only getting 7 days. That's policy as far as I know,[1] and it would be nice to at least get two weeks, but I can't blame the individual proposer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy#Prop...
Chesterton's fence goes both ways. Wikipedia policies are there for non-obvious reasons in some cases.
> You can't inform users who would be able to contribute off-Wikipedia:
Canvassing is one thing. Productively finding sources for an article is another. Wikipedia has had many a talk page drown in off-wiki people come in and make an account to prevent some thing from happening, none of them understanding why the thing is happening, none of them understanding Wikipedia policy, and none of them caring. Inviting these people to discussions is not productive and just a bad time for everyone.
If you invite one or two people to actually improve the article, so it can survive on it's own merit, I can't imagine anyone having a problem with that. The equivalent on-wiki thing of just pinging relevant editors is common and encouraged.
> This feels like the actions of a newly promoted editor, inexperienced, and eager to start "cleaning up" Wikipedia,
The user in question has no special user rights (they were automatically updated to an extended confirmed user over a year ago), and has a few decently long articles under their belt.
> It also feels like the actions of an editor who, when editing another article, saw that the thing they were adding didn't point to what they expected on Wikipedia:
> instead of adding a page to disambiguate, they decided to go on a crusade to purge articles that had existed for twenty years. And because these were mostly articles that predate Wikipedia's sourcing policies, they knew it was likely they would succeed.
This is a rather unfavourable view of the situation, and not really one made in good faith. I can agree that that article shouldn't have just been turned into a redirect, but that redirect was made by a different user to the one who's been nominating articles for deletion, and I can't see any obvious connection.
Articles being older than the sourcing requirements also do not exclude them from those requirements. They usually get a break because of that, but it's been well over 10 years by this point.
> As I've stated in one of the talk threads: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Left_guide#c-Leejeba... # I'm not particularly concerned about the restoration of some of the articles, instead I'm more concerned about the blunt application of policies that means important reference, history, and culture are being deleted.
Owen who responded to your post makes a good point. I'd argue that if Wikipedia deleting an article about something amounts to the deletion or destruction of history, reference or culture, then thing in question probably has some notability problems. Wikipedia makes it easier to find information about a particular topic, but can't be the only reasonable source of things. There has to at least have been reliable sources for the article to have been based on, even if they aren't easily available at this point.