I took it as a statement that it is prohibitively difficult to contribute to Wikipedia, and wanted to point out that a large number of contributions are being made and the resulting quality being high, in part due to the difficulty of making contributions.

My comment was disputing the statement above that anyone can just stick junk in Wikipedia. While yes anyone can submit edits, it's pretty hard to get them accepted so the content on Wikipedia is more reliable than just a public notepad.

You are mistaking quality with difficulty. Many people have quality information for contributing but lack the time for politics.

Where do I mistake quality for difficulty?

My statement was that the quality of Wikipedia overall is high, and that one of the reasons for that is because they set and enforce standards for contributions.

Certainly many people are put off by the process and will not have time to deal with it, but my belief would be that such cases are more likely on more controversial topics, and less likely for less controversial topics. Inherently, collaborating on difficult topics will be a difficult process, which also means that there are likely no easy answers for how to make this process not discourage anyone.