I agree that it's a mistake that Wikipedia is deleting these articles, free software is probably taking the brunt of it because there are no print magazines for software (or very few compared to professions that existed before).

Overall, the deletionism hasn't seemed to slow the growth of Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Modelling_Wikipedia%2...

Although I would like to see more recent stats on their deletion rate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Emijrp/Deleting