The reward complex

Obviously I disagree. As long as the backlog of no longer acceptable material remains, people who use it as a model are going to feel "bitten" - with justification. Add to this the phenomenon of autopatrolled people who continue to create new material to the standard that was current when they began editing, or below - and newbies are correct in feeling abused.

As examples of new material, exempt from patrolling, I offer two recent cases from english wikipedia (not citations, sorry; this is from memory)

Exhibit A - an _admin_ who completely failed to understand the concept of plagiarism and copyright violation, and eventually quit wikipedia when the state of their articles, and those they approved, became a scandal. (I believe this erupted in the did-you-know arena, if someone wants to hunt for details.)

Exhibit B - a long time editor, autopatrolled, whose idea of fun was to create incoherent stubs, generally full of errors. He apparantly used cut and paste and a template, not google translate; in any case, he didn't even proofread basic facts. The results had to be seen to be believed; even then, the full impact required some knowledge of the obscure areas he chose to write about (e.g. train stations in France, on english wikipedia, with info boxes giving the wrong line, wrong location, etc.) He did this in several language wikipedias, including english and greek; no one could find a language he was capable of writing coherently. He had a name like "pumpee", but I don't have a clue how to spell it.

These people created 1000s of articles, many of them quite recently, and while they are no longer active, I'm sure there are other similar editors remaining. Meanwhile some poor newb gets reverted for unreferenced (but accurate) information, perhaps while s/he's trying to figure out how to use the rather impenetrable reference templates.

Of course s/he feels abused.

The second editor's username is Pumpie, whose userpage is here. If you read his talk page, you'll see that he was a problem contributor for quite a few years. While I disagree with you that he was doing all of this as an "idea of fun", the rest of your comment is spot-on: various other editors worked hard to get him to contribute usefully, got frustrated, & those who tried to help him either quit or came close to it.

I don't recognize enough from your description of the first editor to identify him.

But what happened with Pumpie made it hard for the other editors to assume good faith to the next editor who doesn't understand Wikipedia rules, regardless of the nature of the misunderstanding. That's one reason I had no problem with being the heavy & blocking users like Chuck Marean & Mcjakeqcool for incompetence: there are other editors who are far more deserving of attention & TLC -- not all of whom are newcomers -- than goofballs like these who you have to honestly wonder how they manage to remember how to breathe. These 3 not only wasted the time of useful editors who could have been improving content, they led some of them to burn out. Which helps no one.

The problem from the point of view of a new editor, though, is that Pumpie remained autopatrolled until he was finally banned. The only people reviewing his articles were those who made it their business to try to do something about him, and only after he'd splashed his ineptitude all over areas they cared about.

What % of objectionable newbies are actually worse than he was? Yet everyone makes it their business to review newbies, and too many use terms like "new editor" as a synonymn for "incompetent."

From a newbie's POV, maybe the rules applied to newbies should be applied to everyone. After all, at least some of the existing frequent editors are clearly incompetent. Or maybe evidence of competence should be accepted in lieu of enormous edit counts, to get one treated like a useful contributor. _Including_ in Rfa discussions, which sure seems unlikely to happen ;-)

Likewise, perhaps evidence of moderate incompetence should lead to downgrades - admin -> autopatrolled -> ordinary "newb," depending on the extent of the ineptitude. With spot checks, such as perhaps some % of privileged actions going to automatic review, perhaps mixed in with actions of the non-privileged.

But of course this implies a rules oriented group, rather than a social connection oriented group. Wiki editors ought to be more rules oriented than most groups, because of the proportion of nerds and geeks (complimentary terms in my lexicon, since they tend to be honest, hard working, and logical). But I doubt that exempts wikipedia from the clique problems common in mature organizations - even geeks aren't saints, and not all wiki editors or admins are geeks.