Frank's proposal

Hi all, thanks a lot for your feedback. To me, the situation in a nutshell looks like the following:

(1) For new contributors it's not obvious what kind of support we need. People open a page and all links on that page are blue. And if they find something they can fix, they struggle with the wiki-markup in the editbox. And after they finally pushed the save-button, someone leaves a cryptic message full of abbreviations on their talk page and tells them how many mistakes they made. Or their edit just gets reverted.

(2) The same situation from the perspective of a long-term Wikipedian might look like the following: Thousands of people edit Wikipedia every day without knowing much about its rules and its specific culture. It looks like they ignore all consensus that the community has built over time. These "newbies" just seem to increase the workload of the existing community members – they write articles that need to be wikified, they ask questions about problems that have been resolved 4 years ago and in the worst case they try to push an odd minority viewpoint.

One of the biggest questions from my point of view is: How can we shorten the distance between these two groups? How can we make sure that both groups understand each other's perspektive, needs and worries? How can we help people to understand what kind of help we need? And what is the best way to reach out to people that have the skills and knowledge we need.

Please let me know what you think. I highly appreciate this conversation.