Say you draw a venn diagram with three intersecting circles:

  1. People with technical web expertise

  2. People with deep domain knowledge

  3. People willing to deal with bureaucracy

You will get a very tiny population.

Wikipedia wasn’t always like this, the problem is that well established editors have built a fort to keep the noobs out—not because they are power thirsty—but because they don’t want to deal with noob mistakes.

As with anyone new to a job, your first week will likely be a net loss to the company: they have to show you the ropes, set up your computer, take you out for lunch, make you feel welcome, etc. The wikipedia editors don’t want to deal with this, so they just build technical and policy barriers to keep new people out.

Around three years ago I decided on “donating” one day of my life to Wikipedia in Spanish. I went around areas of interest, fixed some stuff, created two new articles of well recognized designers. The next day both articles were “nominated for deletion”, one because it wasn’t properly formatted or referenced, and the other for copyright infringement. An overzealous editor made a search on google and found a similar article in a blog, my own blog! which I release under public domain and which shares my wikipedia handle.

I ended up collaborating one day and fighting bureaucracy three days. No wonder they’re having trouble finding new editors.