The first experience for new users to the English Wikipedia

Some people start fixing articles and don't create new ones for ages if at all - I was definitely in that group. But every year many tens of thousands of newbies start by creating an article. I've just looked at en:wiki/Special:NewPages and five out of fifty articles created in the last hour were by editors with redlinked talkpages, and that isn't unusual. Newpage patrol on EN wiki is an intimidating place and extremely unfriendly to newbies, so I doubt if many of the new editors we get there will stay with us, but it is where we meet and reject a large proportion of our newbies.

Most speedy deletions are "correct" as far as policy is concerned, and I've little sympathy with the vandals and spammers who are a significant proportion of these editors. Though I suspect we could re-educate/retrain and recruit a larger proportion of our copypaste merchants whose first article creation is a copyvio - remember every such article tagged as copyvio is an opportunity to create a sourced article.... Though not all are reliable sources or notable subjects.

However the editor survey will leave a lot of these article creators out because it didn't have access to deleted edits, and many of these newbies will have had all their edits deleted. My experience of looking at thousands of articles tagged for speedy deletion is that a disconcertingly large minority are overhasty or simply incorrect tags. Almost every time I go through the category of articles tagged for speedy deletion I find an incorrect tag and a bitten newbie, sometimes with a redlinked talkpage that means they might never know the fate of their article. Some of my fellow admins seem capable of clearing category speedy deletions at a speed that leads me to suspect that many incorrectly tagged articles are deleted per that tag.