Clay Shirky on the four primary factors motivating participation

Aye, Shirky's comments make sense to me too. The feeling seems to be that too often the feedback (especially for new users) is "Go away!" and their subsequent feelings about competence might be "gee! I suck!" and so they leave.

There's also a sense that people now need a much higher level of competence than they used to. When I first joined, citing sources was no big deal and I'd regularly write 500 words on a subject and meet no resistence whatsoever. Hard to see that happening now. Look at en:wp's article on "Light Entertainment"... for that I just spilled out everything I could think of onto the page knowing that someone would help me out later on. As it happens that article doesn't appear to have changed much; the article has been tagged but most of my dubious assertions still exist :o)