This weekend I was at the Wikimedia stand in https://fosdem.org (+5000 free software geeks in Brussels). We asked every single person stopping by whether they had edited Wikipedia. The majority had not, thinking that they were not really qualified, or not knowing where to start. We showed them the "Help out" section at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_portal, which nobody had seen before, and they found it interesting. However, a significant minority had edited, but the conversation always had this pattern: - Have you edited Wikipedia? - Yes... (silence), but then my edits were gone (shrug with a kind of embarrassed smile). I didn't ask, but the average impression these people left me was that they believed that maybe they were not qualified to edit Wikipedia after all. What a missed opportunity for Wikimedia!!! During the whole weekend I only found one successful regular editor that was not involved in other Wikimedia activities. And one photographer that contributed to Commons contests. I'm not saying those reverts / deletions were wrong. However, maybe a better UI would not send new editors to a cliff so consistently? People seem to understand the benefit of starting with "Help out" types of action as a training, if only they knew such thing existed. Also, would it be useful to warn new editors adding more than NNN characters about the likely need of citations? PS: and another article about forking/federating Wikipedia as an alternative to deletionism http://blog.jonudell.net/2015/01/22/a-federated-wikipedia/ -- Quim Gil Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil