There's a huge problem with the current Wikipedia community being almost outright hostile to new editors. Edits that are either poorly formatted or poorly written are often reverted rather than improved, and the edits of unregistered editors are very likely to be reverted. Mostly, this is due to the desire to fight vandalism, and fairly strong xenophobia.
With tools like huggle, it becomes trivially easy to scan hundreds of edits an hour, and reverting is as easy as pressing 'r'. The problem is, vandal patrolling with huggle is really boring. You're on the lookout for things to revert, and can quite easily misinterpret someone changing a number ("512" to "568") as subtle vandalism. So, someone comes along, fixes a figure that was wrong, and within 1 minute, their change is reverted. It presents a really uninviting face to the uninitiated.
As for xenophobia, the wikipedia community is almost paranoid when it comes to outside influence. This distrust isn't unwarranted, as there have been many instances of various groups plotting to have wikipedia reflect their reality. What this means, however, is that external calls to edit a particular article will likely wind up at AN/I (Administrator's Noticeboard / Incidents, basically where you go to tell on people), and the first thing any new editor would be greeted with would be a notice saying a diplomatic version of "we're on to you".
Policy itself isn't the problem; it's the community. Policy both reflects and shapes community dynamics. However, Wikipedia is a "Jimbotocracy". Jimbo can, has, and will continue to, overrule the community and do whatever he wants, usually in the form of banning / unbanning / stripping or granting of privileges. In addition, ArbCom, the "Supreme Court", if you will, defers to Jimbo. While Jimbo doesn't set policy directly (although he reserves the right to), he does heavily influence it. His views on what policy should be are often taken as passed down from the mountaintop on stone tablet, so it matters what he thinks and why he thinks it.
Anything that discourages them. For instance, immediately reverting their edits for whatever reason[0] rather than fixing them or suggesting a fix; nasty messages posted to their talk pages criticising their edits; drive-by tagging pages they created with lots of boxes indicating that their article is bad and/or inappropriate. I was a Wikipedia regular for several years, but these days it seems like if I do anything more than basic spelling fixes it becomes an unpleasant experience.
[0]Lack of notability and lack of source information are the two big ones there.
With tools like huggle, it becomes trivially easy to scan hundreds of edits an hour, and reverting is as easy as pressing 'r'. The problem is, vandal patrolling with huggle is really boring. You're on the lookout for things to revert, and can quite easily misinterpret someone changing a number ("512" to "568") as subtle vandalism. So, someone comes along, fixes a figure that was wrong, and within 1 minute, their change is reverted. It presents a really uninviting face to the uninitiated.
As for xenophobia, the wikipedia community is almost paranoid when it comes to outside influence. This distrust isn't unwarranted, as there have been many instances of various groups plotting to have wikipedia reflect their reality. What this means, however, is that external calls to edit a particular article will likely wind up at AN/I (Administrator's Noticeboard / Incidents, basically where you go to tell on people), and the first thing any new editor would be greeted with would be a notice saying a diplomatic version of "we're on to you".
Policy itself isn't the problem; it's the community. Policy both reflects and shapes community dynamics. However, Wikipedia is a "Jimbotocracy". Jimbo can, has, and will continue to, overrule the community and do whatever he wants, usually in the form of banning / unbanning / stripping or granting of privileges. In addition, ArbCom, the "Supreme Court", if you will, defers to Jimbo. While Jimbo doesn't set policy directly (although he reserves the right to), he does heavily influence it. His views on what policy should be are often taken as passed down from the mountaintop on stone tablet, so it matters what he thinks and why he thinks it.