Perhaps of interest to participants in this discussion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2020-03-01/Opini…,
titled "Wikipedia is another country", by User:Gog the Mild
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gog_the_Mild).
I'll quote two paragraph of this essay here. (For the license for this
text, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attributio….)
"Which brings me back to psychological preparedness. I was not
accustomed to being the new member of an established group and the
slow kid at the back of the class at the same time. Relying on the
charity of others to metaphorically tie my shoelaces. It grated. This
was entirely my own, fairly reasonable (I think), issue. Nor was I
prepared for the casual offhandedness which is fairly common. Recently
I suffered a mass revert with the edit summary "Learn some
intellectual property law". This bluntness rankled. It was my issue
rather than the reverting editor's, but that didn't help reduce the
rankle. Since discovering MilHist I have stumbled around in this small
corner of Wikipedia, occasionally bumping into helpful tools which I
endeavour to clutch close.
"The near complete lack of usable guides – IMO – to the basics is
heavily compensated by the, usually, enormous willingness of complete
strangers to spend time and effort correcting my idiocies, reducing my
ignorance and remembering that they too were newbies once. Members of
the Military History Project have collegially made the project a
comfortable place to work in such a natural, even graceful, way that
what they have achieved seems normal."
My guess is that many good novice users quit after encountering
interpersonal, procedural, or technical problems which they don't know
how to resolve, or exceed their tolerances. I think that English
Wikipedia's Teahouse has been successful with addressing some of these
issues, but as Gog the Mild notes, we could do more.
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )