If you find a problem with an article, consider some alternatives that might make the author of the article feel better, while protecting the quality of Wikipedia. These alternatives also have the advantage of not requiring an administrator’s help:
If there’s nothing on the page worth keeping, try to identify a related page that’s useful to readers, and create a redirect (For Old Names and Bad Spellers: Redirects). Redirects work particularly well when the editor who created the page has lost interest and stopped editing, and that would be the only person objecting.
Move the page to a new subpage in the user space of the editor who created it. This approach (called userification) is particularly good for articles where it’s unclear that notability can ever be established. It challenges the editor to find sources, or let the page languish. Make sure that you put a note on the user talk page about what you’ve done, with a link to the new subpage, and offer to help explain policies and guidelines further if the editor would like. (For further information, see Wikipedia:Userfication, shortcut WP:UFY.)
Note
Userificiation is excellent for a page that’s well-meant but has little hope of ever becoming a valid article. After you move the page to userspace, your note should also mention that there are other places where the writing might really belong (WikiInfo.org and WP:TRY are particularly good things to include). Also ask that the editor delete the contents of the moved page within a week or so, because Wikipedia isn’t a hosting service.
Where there’s a bit of useful information, but only a smidgen, and you have doubts that the article can be easily expanded (or ever expanded into a real article), merge the information into another article on a broader topic, and put a redirect in place. In the best of worlds, you can create a new section in the article on the broader topic, and link to that. In any case, try to link to a section of the article, to encourage the editor to expand that.
Here too, leave a note on the user talk page for the author of the article, saying that you’ve merged the information from that article into another article, and that you hope the editor can expand what’s in that larger topic.
You can also copy the information to a sister project such as Wiktionary (most commonly), or at least put a template on it suggesting that it be copied, and hope that someone else will do so. Once the information is copied across, the page can be made into a redirect, or deleted.
Obviously, this final option is limited to things that really do belong elsewhere, such as a dictionary definition, and only when such an entry doesn’t exist at all in the other wiki. (If it does exist, then copying the article in its entirety isn’t really an option.) But if you can move the material, it may make the editors feel that’s he’s contributed to something, even if not Wikipedia. (For more information, see the Meta page Help:Transwiki and the guideline Wikipedia:Wikimedia sister projects; shortcut: WP:SIS.)