Frank's proposal

Thanks Frank. I think you've described the problem well: shortening the distance between the two groups. New editors get frustrated when the task is confusing, and the other editors seem arbitrary. Veterans get frustrated when new editors seem reckless, and old disputes keep being revisited by new faces. I mean, this is THE problem as far as community health is concerned, and we're talking about a variety of solutions.

But there is a lot we can do with just the platform.

I was going to say "usability". But that grossly oversimplifies things. There are really multiple stages in the editor lifecycle, and a usable interface will gradually bring people from novice to expert. When an editor shows up and doesn't even understand how to edit and format something, just having WYSIWYG is a huge help. But as time goes on, you want to bridge the gap between new editors and veterans editors by making it easier to do the things that veterans spend a lot of time doing. I think one of the biggest gaps between new users and veteran users is research. I remember having a hard time with that when I showed up, but as I became more diligent with sourcing, I generally encountered fewer problems. There are other things that separate veterans from newbies, like spell checking, certain formatting conventions, and a sense of patience with the process... but tools can help with those too. I'd highly recommend making a list of common tasks and processes, and then think of ways to simplify them.

I have another idea that may seem counter-intuitive at first. To shorten the distance between veterans and newbies, we should limit what new users can do. This isn't to require them to jump through a ton of hoops. It's to give them time to work with the basics before they start getting themselves into trickier areas. The best way to traverse the distance is one step at a time. When new users jump too far ahead -- by modifying a featured article or jumping in on a contentious "POV dispute" -- they almost always get push back from people who have been there a long time. So the platform should work with the idea that certain processes or classes of articles may be off limits at first. (Or if we don't want to be that restrictive, make that stuff available with lots of asterisks and exclamation marks.)

I think you've even identified a step that's more part of reader conversion... before someone is a new editor, they are a reader. Helping people bridge *that* gap will be invaluable.