Excellent resolution. Implementing it will be a complex task

(Speaking based on English Wikipedia) Wikipedia editing is, overall, a mean place. The sheer quantity of rules and pseudo-rules, written in unrealistic and imprecise ways, and where the "real" way that Wikipedia works (when it does work) is an unwritten complex interplay which takes hundreds of hours to learn contributes to this. Making even the tiniest improvement in policy pages is an incredibly difficult process....some of that is needed to vet changes, but these are also fraught with ownership and categorical resistance to change type issues. The above policies and guidelines are prone to mis-use, when the bad guys win and the good guys lose and go away in disgust. At the granular level, the combination of the way the policies are written and applied is often in conflict with the higher level objectives of Wikipedia. So, excellent resolution which will be a complex, difficult and worthwhile task to implement. North8000 12:49, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

Yes, the shear weight of policies and guidelines is utterly overwhelming for new editors. Even most "welcome" templates contain a frightening number of links to "rules" pages for the newbie. Trying to teach newbies how not to get bitten can be just as off-putting as actually getting bitten. Excuse the anectodal evidence, but my sister once expressed a wish to write an article for Wikipedia, and knowing that I am a regular contributor, came to me for advice. She is an English Literature graduate and could probably have written many excellent articles for Wikipedia. I ran through all the things that one should do to get an article through the outer defences, and after patiently listening to all that, she walked from Wikipedia and never came back.

We need to find a way to allow new editors to work in safety without the continual risk of being clobbered with warnings and templates, or the need to learn lots of rules right from day one. Here's a suggestion, when a new editor attempts to create a new page, before actually committing it, offer the newbie (through some automated process) the opportunity to create it in userspace instead with a very brief summary of the benefits on screen. At some later stage, perhaps when the article reaches a certain size, or when attempting to move it to mainspace, offer the newbie an opportunity to have it reviewed by a more experienced editor.

The basic idea is to let the newbie learn the rules in a gradual way at their own pace. This way they may not even realise they have been learning anything - it just happens naturally by osmosis. Spinningspark 11:02, 8 May 2011 (UTC)