[aeontech]

Wow, I seem to have struck quite a nerve there.

I have no doubt that Wikipedia has to deal with a flood of trolls and vandals, that that is a tremendous amount of work, and that the editors are doing their utmost to follow the standards defined by the community.

I am merely pointing out that the culture and standards as they stand now lead to a situation where a newcomer (or even a long-time contributor) is likely to bounce off after being caught in an edit war once too many times. Saying "Oh, just contribute an article when you see a gap" is an invitation to sink a potentially unbounded amount of time and effort into something that has an unfortunately high chance of being eventually deleted.

Don't mistake me, I love the concept of Wikipedia, and I think it's a fantastic project – I just find it tragic. Maybe it's truly the tragedy of the commons and the situation is unavoidable because of the flood of spam/vandalism, but I wonder whether you see there a problem to be solved at all.