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> Wales is right about one thing, though. This fact does have enormous policy implications. If Wikipedia is written by occasional contributors, then growing it requires making it easier and more rewarding to contribute occasionally. Instead of trying to squeeze more work out of those who spend their life on Wikipedia, we need to broaden the base of those who contribute just a little bit.
This has been EXACTLY my experience and it really really turned me off from even bothering in the future. :(
[1] It's a very prettied-up domain-specific language but it's still copyleft software.
EDIT: the other big difference is that every time I've attempted to contribute to an open-source project, people have, in general, been helpful and willing to explain what needed improvement. On Wikipedia, it's a much more hostile attitude. People are less willing to explain why your content was reverted or nominated for deletion, and if you protest, there's a decent chance that you'll be sanctioned (either topic-banned or temp-banned from Wikipedia). Imagine if forgetting to run a linter got your SSH key tempbanned from the project and you'll have a closer analogy to the current process.
Do we have any surveys for wikipedia like stackoverflow about the demography of editors and how many people visit pages in particular categories? How often will someone notice a mistake and try to fix it?
Some occasiinal contributions only press for others to do something, helpfully pointing out what they think are mistakes and errors. This is someone with an axe to grind in denigrating wiki lingo.
As someone who's been told of there before, I think I understand the problem, and I like to agree with Aaron's sentiment--I don't know where it's coming from, though.
The quote is very much related. Who is "we"?
> we need to broaden the base of those who contribute just a little bit.
Easing the entry to beaurocracy would likely increase its burden significantly, while its not strictly separable from content contribution.
Nevertheless, being a frequent and fair editor is not a sufficient criterium for good administration, sadly.
I think that's still a good approach. You want Wikipedia to be a trustworthy source, not one where everyone can add their half-knowledge without any checks.
Maybe making the discussion pages more "interactive" might help a bit. People could share their ideas, interesting sources or other inputs in a casual way and someone more skilled in writing and researching could use that to write the proper article.