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Is Wikipedia's Popularity Causing Its Decline?
HughPickens.com writes: Researchers Halfaker, Geiger, Morgan, and Riedl have a new paper on the topic of open collaboration systems about how Wikipedia's reaction to its popularity is causing its decline. From the Abstract: "Open collaboration systems like Wikipedia need to maintain a pool of volunteer contributors in order to remain relevant. Wikipedia was created through a tremendous number of contributions by millions of contributors. However, recent research has shown that the number of active contributors in Wikipedia has been declining steadily for years, and suggests that a sharp decline in the retention of newcomers is the cause. This paper presents data that show that several changes the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and consistency in the face of a massive growth in participation have ironically crippled the very growth they were designed to manage. Specifically, the restrictiveness of the encyclopedia's primary quality control mechanism and the algorithmic tools used to reject contributions are implicated as key causes of decreased newcomer retention. Further, the community's formal mechanisms for norm articulation are shown to have calcified against changes – especially changes proposed by newer editors."
What the hell?
Wikipedia's asshole editors are causing its decline. It has been going on for a long time.
It's the editing cabals that are causing the decline. No new user will put up with that kind of bullshit and stick around.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
...when a simple (small, perfectly accurate, in accordance with the guidelines) edit I did to clarify a definition apparently warranted no less than 3 separate "warnings" about it; I could only conclude that they didn't, in fact, wanted contributions.
AC comments get piped to
Most organizations when they start there is rapid growth, for Wikipedia, there is a lot of information to be loaded in and maintained. Now for the most part a lot of this information is in, and may be taking minor edits or changes for most articles. Many things do not have new insights or new discoveries in generations. So the bulk of the articles don't need to be updated with latest and greatest, because they are already there.
So a decline in contributions is expected as it is now one of the great repositories of information.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Number of contributors is falling because:
- The bulk of articles entries has been already created, what is left is to update them and the ones not created due to lack of specialist knowledge
- Every now and then very active contributors have to fight about something minor* with admins, usually surrender and decide whole project is not work their time
* I guess that most pointless wars are about article deletion due to insignificance, people feel more important when they can protect wikipedia from running out of free pages.
There is another point to consider: at the beginning, there was a lot to do, including easy stuff. You only had to know well a subject and be the first to write the article. Nowadays, almost everything is already written. To make a significant contribution, you would have to be an expert on an obscure topic.
Holy fuck, nothing needs to be studied here. The problem is clear: people who have no power in real life and too much time on their hands have used the overly-bureaucratic editorial process at Wikipedia to drive away all of the normal people who used to contribute.
It's the same problem that plagues Stack Overflow, Hacker News, Reddit, and even Slashdot to some degree: nearly all of the moderators cause far more harm than they do good, and this drives away the best normal users.
I tried to make some corrections to some pages a few years back...you guessed it - totally reverted almost instantly! No recourse or reason, totally turned me off trying to help...
Now some may argue that this is part of an effort to keep out slanted/paid content, but that ship has sailed, and the interests that can afford to pay editors to push articles a certain way have the power and funding to push through the curmudgeons. The current attitude actually only serves those interests, as small, independent editors are more likely to get discouraged and leave.
Mr. Wales doesn't care though, as long as he can do his yearly beg for money dance all is good in his world.
Silence is a state of mime.
Go ahead and try to make a contribution to a Wikipedia article.
Watch as it's reverted within minutes by the veteran editor who is babysitting that article.
Go ahead and try and cite sources when trying to add something.
Watch as your sources are labeled as biased or not trustworthy.
Wikipedia is a nepotism-fueled hellhole. Truth doesn't matter, only "verifiability". And "verifiability" is entirely subjective depending on the editor you're fighting against. You'll see sources like Buzzfeed considered higher-priority than official sources, if the editor feels like it. You cannot contribute to Wikipedia. You'll get crushed between the different editing factions, or "projects" as they're officially called.
Is the lack of new contributors to Wikipedia a good thing or a bad thing?
Wikipedia started with 0 pages. Now it has 38 million pages. There are fewer articles to write than their were before, and they have realized that having fandom pages for every character of every new anime series isn't what Wikipedia is for. That restricts the easy-to-write new articles and means new contributors leave because they don't have anything to contribute.
Newbies deserve hazing. This separates out the wheat from the chaff.
Wikipedia is not your liberal bastion where everybody has the right of not being micro-offended.
Bear the fuck down.
Wikipedia works fine
It isn't just the shitty editors, though. It's the shitty editors who are enabled and empowered by the so-called "social justice" movement.
The "social justice" movement is all about exerting control over what others think, believe and express. This is done by any means necessary, including hypocrisy and censorship.
There is a huge overlap between those who support the "social justice" movement and those who participate as editors at Wikipedia. Both draw in the same sort of academically-minded people who can't function within the real world. So they build their bureaucracies in academia and online at places like Wikipedia where they can actively engage in the suppression of others.
These are the people who will manipulate Wikipedia articles to match the narrative that they want to dictate. These are the people who will suppress any sort of original thought. These are the sort of people who claim to be "tolerant", while practicing what is an extreme form of intolerance. These are the sorts of people who will mislabel their opponents as "racists" or "sexists" or "intolerant" or "bullies", even when that's clearly not the case.
The awful editing at Wikipedia is just a symptom of the "social justice" disease that affects society today.
...suggests that a sharp decline in the retention of newcomers is the cause....
That's the symptom.
In order to solve the problem, go after the causes, not the symptoms.
.
The reason for the sharp decline in retention of newcomers is the way their edits are treated. Fix that and you'll have more contributors.
After having four new pages in a row deleted that had four or more citations each, I gave up. One of the pages was for my uncle who was nominated for a grammy and has two platinum records, but his page was deleted for not being "notable."
The issue with Wikipedia is the lack of a decent sandbox for people to collate and collect information to help others work together to form an actual article of worth.
It ends up being a case of you either have the article ready or piss off.
And there are a bunch of admins that abuse newcomers and anonymous editors so hard.
A good example is some people making contributions, some abusive admin wank comes in, removes the edit, then re-adds it themselves at a later point, or never.
Another thing that also worsens stuff is horribly strict notability rules and petty conflicts.
And if you remember the Old Man Murray thing, some twats like to enforce that heavily, be it for vengeance or because it is the only sense of power they have.
These things push people away.
In order for wikipedia to succeed, it needs to be more social and less antisocial. (I'm not speaking shit like Facebook or whatever)
As it is now, it is horribly antisocial purely through design. The amount of collaboration you can have between users is, quite frankly, piss poor at best.
The semi-static editing system just doesn't work. It needs to be more pseudo-realtime at the least in order to grow.
They should look in to the (previously Google) Wave and other realtime collab systems and come up with one that is more optimal for Wikipedia, combined with a newer sandbox system that allows you to collect facts together about an article without actually making a full article.
The discussion page just doesn't cut it.
I've tried to contribute to Wikipedia. Nothing ever made it past the editors.
I don't try any more.
Case closed.
...laura
> Is Wikipedia's Popularity Causing Its Decline?
No one ever goes there anymore. It's too crowded.
To me it looks like fiefdoms are created and nobody makes sure they aren't abusive. In my case, my change to a talk page (not the actual article page!) was erased without comment a few hours after my change.
My sin was pointing out that the article grossly misrepresented its reference material.
I encourage everyone to read the references to this article and see that they are completely misrepresented in the article.
The page in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Lazowski
Summary: he saved no Jews.
What does "formal mechanisms for norm articulation" mean?
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
It's no different that pretty much any website. They push their agenda, as some other sites push the opposite agenda. The PROBLEM, is that people see it as a website version of an encyclopedia, which it is not. How many errors, or out and out lies have been discovered on that site. It's like any other website. Take it with a grain of salt, unless you can independently verify the information from other sources.
Over the last few years I've tried to make various edits/corrections, only to learn that my IP has been blocked.
I use a commercial VPN because 'fuck the NSA' so Wikipedia is disenfranchising a large population of the internet in the interest of vandalism prevention.
I see their point, but it's definitely affected my ability to improve the quality of Wikipedia to the point where I no longer consider submitting improvements.
Fuck this guy and the editors accepting his bullshit.
I put in a simple sentence and get both of these complaints:
1) Minimal change
2) No supporting evidence.
Morons are too stupid to realize that those are contradictory issues. If the change is minimal, it should not need supporting evidence. If it needs supporting evidence, then it is NOT minimal.
(Specifically I put in a line on every single element indicating how the majority of that element is believed to have been created - which stage of a star's life cycle creates each element. One sentence per element and all those changes were deleted by idiots refusing to add a tiny bit more information that is known and accepted science).
The problem with Wikipedia is that it is edited and controlled by deceitful, treacherous lying Jews.
Are you sure it's not amphibian alien transsexuals?
I still remember the very day that Wikipedia's homepage strictly stated "DON'T POST THIS ON SLASHDOT", which of course I found through Slashdot. Back when the site first launched, that very first day. For the first couple of years, I contributed quite a bit, but don't really do much of that ever anymore. Why?
It is the "low hanging fruit" problem: http://www.urbandictionary.com...
Essentially, all of the easy and common knowledge topics have already been covered. We're at the point now where only two types of edits can really happen. First is highly specialized knowledge, so yes, only a fraction of the community can do that properly. The second is new and emerging ideas, which is generally also highly specialized knowledge that has yet to become common knowledge, so again a very small subset of people who can contribute.
If anything, this isn't a problem. It means they've achieved a very significant goal. They have a huge percentage of human factual knowledge all in one place.
But all I heard was that the new editors get raked over the coals, and that it isn't worth the time.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
I'd love to spend some time trying to make it better, but every edit I've had has been declined. So ya, good luck with that
i believe wikipedia's own "humorous" article on WikiSpeak explains a lot about the issues it's having.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
"Wikipedia has changed from “the encyclopedia that anyone can edit” to “the encyclopedia that anyone who understands the norms, socializes him or herself, dodges the impersonal wall of semi-automated rejection and still wants to voluntarily contribute his or her time and energy can edit”
The former turned out to be a monumentally bad idea, creating a space filled with weird conspiracy editors, tendentious axe-grinding, automated submission systems, random drive-by vandalism, massive amount of astroturfing, and general trolling. Hence, the latter.
...actually hire and pay editors like a normal encyclopedia rather than focus on improving an already mature enough web application.
It's not a social club, it's a mission-driven org. A lot of people are not suitable for participation, and they'll get weeded out. Others just have knowledge that's very common and don't want to do boring stuff. How many people does the project need? How many can it productively use? I don't think the answer is everyone on the planet.
Doesn't mean that some of the other criticisms are not also right.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
The auxiliary verb (did) is marked for past tense, but the main verb is not. It appears in its base form.
Wikipedia at this point is just a site that has one point of view on something. It's assuredly not a neutral point of view, and massive swaths of data on the site are suppressed or banned, including entire social movements.
I have contributed several edits to Wikipedia, and have added a couple of articles. As a result, I was asked to contribute to a related field by the editors of that field (I declined, as it was outside my expertise). My opinion is that most articles on Wikipedia are objectively neutral and fairly balanced. It depends very strongly on the editors and the contributors.
Not sure about those "social movements", you mentioned. Anything social and/or political is a point of view disaster (or success, depending on your point of view).
Aaron released this paper back in 2013. It's still quite relevant, but I feel it's pretty disingenuous to call it a "new paper". The filename even has "13" in it.
This lab at UMN is still doing great work published in conferences like ACM CSCW and ACM SIGCHI.
Let me cancel out the comments like "Heck, just try editing wikipedia! Everything I post is reverted instantly!" by posting my experience.
I edit Wikipedia maybe once every few months. None of my edits have ever been reverted or debated. I've anonymously edited things I know about like the article on sorting algorithms. I've edited things I know nothing about, like the article on depth charges. In the latter cases, I was usually reading the article and misunderstood something, so I read more elsewhere, then went back to reword or clarify the section that was unclear. I've fixed citations and spelling errors randomly. No complaints, reverts, or edit wars.
Given the rather... opinionated... Slashdot culture, I would love to know what articles people are editing that cause flame wars. Because I just don't see it
This is one reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
And the begging for money they don't need is another reason.
"the community's formal mechanisms for norm articulation are shown to have calcified against changes"
Are you an executive or a Robot.
Either way that fails the Turing Test.
DO you actual speak like that?
... you never had to deal with the German WP. Their Admins & editors are unbearable BOFH arseholes second to none. I mean that. Seriously.
I have tried twice to go through the process of having my students create, or edit, an entry for the school. Both times the process made it impossible.
Long time users that take it upon themselves to change the culture from collaboration to exclusion.
The wikipedia Editor who queried the existence of truth is clearly part of the problem. Nutjob post-modernists who know nothing of Sokal.
work in progress
The AP news network, Reuters, often feed networks such as the BBC and CNN, but those conglomerates are well aware of the biases inbuilt within those feeder networks and how journalists or those skilled in propaganda to their own end can leverage those networks to fit their needs.
Wikipedia's in the same boat. Early adopters who 'early on' built a reputation now act with dictatorial control over the material on Wikipedia. Any changes I have attempted to make are removed within minutes, no matter how benign. This isn't a collaborative system. It's a closed system which provides an illusion of collaboration through the collaboratively appearing mechanisms.
I often wondered if ANYONE was actually seeing any changes I made other than the petty tyrants who control it.
What active contributers are constantly spanked for contributing by those who have developed their own methods and ways, it's these users who spoil it for the rest of the community, and accordingly, there's no reason to contribute to a community which doesn't want the contributions.
Accordingly, I no longer regard Wikipedia as a credible source.
Even more, I am trying to get Google to deprioritize it in my search results. It annoyingly keeps returning Wikipedia as the top source for nearly any search. I'm like.. Google, if I wanted Wikipedia's answer, I would have gone directly there to ask for it.
Wikipedia's mission is not to reflect truth as much as the consensus narrative of reliable sources.
Wikipedia has abusive admins known as "checkusers", such as Mike V, Material Scientist, DoRD and Elockid. Many users were banned due to faulty "evidence" from checkusers. If you donated to Wikipedia, ask for your money back as it is wasted by these bastard checkuser thugs.
when I have to fight to make free contributions because of dick editors, idiots with massive ego's and bias camping articles then what the fuck do they expect? They made it too easy to be a prick while making it incredibly difficult to contribute without spending massive amounts of time. So fuck them, I gave up contributing about 2 years ago now and I won't be back.
Can any of the people who have anecdotes about asshole editor grievances please actually post some links? Seriously, I don't think you a lying, give us a chance to overthrow the assholes with actual evidence.
As far as I'm concerned the decline of Wikipedia is because the pictures of God were wrong. And that can't be changed because history can't be changed. Same goes for the Internet's decline. A purge of the lies is the best option. A lie = Death by information bullet.
Want to see what scojus thought control looks like on wikipedia?
MGTOW page has been deleted all the time, because the scojus feminists believe it shouldn't be included, and since they only need a few editors to vote "delete" it gets removed.
This is AFTER it had tons of negative updates added, just view the talk page, its a damn warzone.
Here is it before http://i.imgur.com/Nni5Z13.jpg
And after http://i.imgur.com/MQ89wYO.jpg
This is why I will never donate a cent, and actively remind people of their censorship.
All I know is that I hear BSD is Dying..
I live in India, and i posted an article about a fringe freedom struggle movement against the British along with news article proof. And it was rejected :(
-- Karthikeyan A K (India)
It's weak.
My one submission to HHG2G was rejected because it was about something illegal (weed). I never contributed again.
Look at any politically contentious issue on wikipedia and generally they choose a side and censor the other. Ideally what should be done is to cite that there is controversy and allow BOTH or as many sides exist on the matter to have their own section of the entry.
What they do instead is they just remove the alternate view points in many cases entirely.
This renders wikipedia politically biased on many issues and thus not trustworthy.
Wikipedia must be neutral and it is not.
Here someone likely that politically profits from this situation will say "you only don't like it because your faction doesn't profit"... Lets say that is true for the sake of argument... you just admitted I was right that there is bias. Lets see if anyone is dumb enough to make that argument anyway... from what I've seen around here lately... I should get a bite. The tragedy there being that I can't pull the stupid beast onto my boat, knock its tiny brains out, skin, and eat the fool.
Who knows... retard could be good eating.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
heavy censorship on Wikipedia and edit wars. there's a large body of 'trolls' and for pay shills, and insiders who police Wikipedia to control the information on the site. they're attempting to control the types of information that are on the site and spin it positively for corporations, government, police, and military interests. the site is no good if you're interested in anything factual as such and it's mostly industry propaganda. this is also the fault of the way Wikipedia is set up because the site prefers to use propaganda as sources for information, for example they'll use largely company provided sources for information on mental health drugs and the scientific studies on the subject will be edited out as "conspiracy theory" or not fitting the standard of a "good source."
the whole site is in shambles.
expert information and scientific information is therefore lacking on the site.
one time I decided to try to beef up the articles on mind control and electronic warfare weaponry, citing government articles and psychiatrists who were experts on the issue. because the information I was posting painted the government in a negative light, the information was edited out quickly by troll user who edit wars the pages and is friends with all the administrators. I was quickly banned for attempted to undo his reversals of my edits. a look at the talk pages and logs and I find out dozens of users had been banned and had problem for years with this one troll editor who keeps the pages void of real information and pro-government. he attempts to paint the issue as "not real" or "conspiracy theory" or the product of people's delusions and mental health issues.
nothing you can do about it ..
and the issue isn't new. going back to 2010 users attempted to have a page on synthetic telepathy and that year increasing edit wars to remove and censor the information forced Wikipedia to close the page entirely. even though the technology is real and factual, backed by patents and dozens of victims and police officers who've all used it. and now Facebook has announced the technology is coming to facebook eventually, and IBM did predictions in 2011 that it would be coming to consumer grade technology within 5 years.https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2010/05/451768.html
The internet is not void of dozens upon dozens upon thousands of reports of Wikipedia censoring pages and peoples content being removed.
Wikipedia is the defacto "psychological warfare" weapon. It's very valuable. Governments and companies seek to control the knowledge base of society, and that includes hiding negative information, spinning negatives as positives, and making up positive information. They invest and use Wikipedia to control what information you'll find readily available if you do a Google search. You'll walk away misled on most subjects. Entire sciences can be hidden and kept from the publics views by censoring the site as can trade secrets and things that harm the public.
obamasweapon.com
I used to write for Wikipedia but I got sick of the self-appointed asshole who camped out on articles, reverting all changes but their own. I remember one article where me and another person kept tried to update it, and some self-appointed asshole kept reverting all our changes. It wasn't even anything controversial, but the asshole wouldn't let ups make any changes. We talked about it on the edit page and after while we just gave up and abandoned the article. Was there an appeal process for this? Maybe... but it wasn't apparent.
It was pretty common. It was rare to find an article you could update without being reverted. Even the most innocuous, non controversial articles would have a self appointed asshole lingering nearby, and any edit would be reverted as "vandalism."
After a while, I gave up trying to update Wikipedia completely. Life is too short.
I didn't quit Wikpedia because of the new bots, though they hardly helped (public domain images were regularly flagged for deletion... well, what the fuck ever), but the principle reason were assholes. Lots and lots of assholes. And no one at Wikipedia to stop them from giving others a hard time. Today Wikipedia is paying the price for failing to reign in these self-appointed asshole, because now only self-appointed assholes are left.
It is possible to improve Wikipedia by adding quality ground and aerial images to articles. And if not to an article itself, but to the Wikimedia category.
Often the photos in a category are outdated, made by digital cameras of 90s. Sometimes a Wikipedia article lacks a photo completely.
Here is the web-application which I use to plan my Wikimedia&Wikipedia photography expeditions: http://www.ausleuchtung.ch/geo...
Click on the map and it shows geolocations of all the Wikipedia articles in the radius of 10 kilometers (about 6 miles) around the click. The default WIkipedia language is English, but you can change in to French by exchanging "en" on the page to "fr", or German "de", Russian "ru", etc. The map position, zoom, language of the last request are memorized by the application.
So on your vacations or business trip you can click on the map and see geolocations of Wikipedia articles are around, visit the location and upload an updated photo. As saying goes: a picture is worth a thousand words. Especially if it is a quality image made by ta modern camera, using a tripod or an UAV.
... and likely have shrunken or malformed genitalia.
Pretty good post, but the malformed genitalia bit likely got you down-modded to -1. The average SJW lacks the social skills to find a sexual partner. This is due to the fact that they're either ugly, mentally ill, or have shrunken or malformed genitalia.
No doubt Mr. Wales meant well when he called for quality just before the great decline; but he didn't distinguish between narcissism: which is to say, not being caught out, and accuracy - which would have to include taking some chances in order to reflect the best and newest information. So incompleteness (in order to ensure verifiability according to some cobbled-together criteria) actually became a desirable means for many editors, and a goal for some, judging by results.
So his speech initiated a self-reinforcing, ever-tightening conservative regime in which - as under Stalin - the only important thing was never to allow a change that might be shown wrong someday; just stick with the previous coffee-table consensus and never mind the facts. Never try for completeness, or unpopular fact.
This process has continued to feed on itself, like an infinite loop or the French Revolution, as the least conservative and anal-retentive editors amongst the remaining bunch get chucked each year. Left to itself, it can only get worse.
Pernicious cultures in any group or business are notoriously difficult to change. So difficult that it's very foolish to try. As a practical matter, you have to clean house entirely and start again. In this case, bar anyone who's been active in Wikipedia during the last five years from anything except bare contributions for the next ten years; then let them back in very gradually, if at all. So much has been lost that there's little downside at this point.
PS - I'm reminded of Dyson's analysis of bomber formation tightness in WWII.
I wanted to talk about Commodore in Mexico (yes, they sold commodore 16/commodore 64/amiga 5002/200, Pcs). I have flyers and documents. After my first post I got bugged and then literally chased down by an Admin that claimed that i was posting "illegal material" since I need to ask Commodore legal permission for post the flyers made in 1982-1984. WHAT THE HECK!?! He also asked others admin for remove all my edits, material and photos that i posted because I did complain about his behavior. I asked for remove my account and they denied it since "nobody" was over me.
I rage quit, removed my edits. then an admin validated my edits and images again and locked them out WITHOUT MY CREDIT. Actually I let that the flyers rot in my basement for real. I just check wikipedia from now and if something is wrong, I correct it for my own research and no more.
And that is why Wikipedia is losing editors. Once you reach obscure or aberrant subjects the new Wikipedia often becomes next to useless. This wouldn't annoy me but Wikipedia used to be a pretty good resource on many such subjects. An encyclopaedia is meant to be exactly that a compendium of all knowledge, including trivial and outlying fields.. But in fields where things are not cut and dried or where the common consensus among experts in the field is outside of general media knowledge Wikipedia's referencing system simply doesn't work.
References can be a real problem. Sometimes where they do exist references where are all to old books, often out of print for decades or extremely difficult to access. Even then they often chase back further to old papers which are very often virtually impossible (very expensive) to find or collate.. Other times there really are no good references, and only second hand accounts by people like journalists - sometimes containing known errors or deliberate omissions. .. not easy in the era of online information..
In my own primary field Strong AI (where modern academia are usually largely incompetent) even publishing a list of basic background references could be very commercially damaging.. and there are loose ends in my own knowledge that I know about but that I simply don't have the resources to tie down.. (Even with resources the answers might only have the status of hearsay.) It doesn’t help when an area may also have been subject to PC or military driven historical revisionism. In that case only old & proven to be original copies can be remotely trusted
What Wikipedia needs is a separate section on pages that allows subjects with a lower level of evidence. There should obviously be a warning on such sections but they would be a partial solution. As it is many more pages face deletion or destructive pruning because nobody is willing to spend the time and money to research them - and the research of course always has the danger of becoming or of being classified as OR.. There are subjects where that is an amazingly fine line.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
I've found Wikipedia to be accurate, or at least up to my level of knowledge, in areas of hard facts and science. Things like chemistry, physics, math. But some areas where there is controversy may be 'taken over' by people with an allegiance to one side, or even an ax to grind. And all too frequently I will go to an entry that I have some level of knowledge, and it reads like something from a surreal Bizarro World version of the subject.
Some years ago I coined the phrase,
"Wikipedia, the source of all, often accurate information."
Maybe I should upgrade that with a new entry:
"Wikipedia, the source of all, sometimes accurate information."
I think a lot of the problems with reverts and deletions turning off new editors is that new editors are usually drawn into editing minefields simply because of the way human nature works. Since people edit what they read, the most new editors would be drawn to the most popular articles. Popular articles see higher levels of policing than non-popular articles and have also at higher levels of development with a large amount of edit and talk page history. Someone going in to make edits about Han shooting first is of course going to get shot down almost immediately. The other thing that draws users is to add pages about something they know. However something that you know that Wikipedia has missed is likely to not be very notable. As the article discussed notability used to be much more lax, but today the guidelines are in place to make sure there is some third party source material and not just an editor writing stuff from their own experiences. Therefore new editors often get dinged on notability problems. Finally, new editors might not know that people, places, historical events and popular media properties are given much higher scrutiny than let's say 1970's railroad locomotives.
I have had my fair share of run-ins with Wiki Nazis, but generally when I am adding to legitimate gaps in the content that aren't in one of the minefields, I rarely run into problems. Wikipedia probably just needs to do a better job to hive new editors a heads up that they might want to stick to various types of non-controversial edits, like spelling corrections, before they dive in to the deep end. Most open source projects work with way with new contributors needing to work on bug fixes before they can add features.
Regarding deletions, more often than not it is anonymous users who try to come in and delete whole chunks out of an article. It's crap like that that makes me need to patrol my watchlist.