Hi all,
Thanks Jorm for sending this blog to me - Lukas Blakk works at Mozilla and is an advocate for open stuff (my new favorite phrase I swiped from the Ada Initiative!). Lukas wrote a blog about her experience putting together an edit-a-thon at Noisebridge (an awesome hackerspace I can't wait to check out) in San Francisco recently.
http://crashopensource.blogspot.com/2012/01/occupedia-women-contributing-to....
Not only does she have desire to continue these events (yeah!) she shares some cool ideas she believes might help new editors (at the bottom).
I really like the idea of having a symbol next to usernames of new contributors; this might help with less biting and bring more attention to new users in regards to assistance from experienced contributors. Could be an interesting experiment! She also touches on the idea of gamification, an idea that is sort of like the article incubator (which encourages collaboration more than just "creating an article and hoping that more seasoned editors approve it" which is what article review comes off to me as being), and a more visible adoption program (and hopefully the project I'm working on right now will help with that!).
Always excites me to see others thinking about these things who are somewhat outside of the Wikipedia community; I think having fresh eyes and minds on what Wikipedia needs to improve is extremely valuable.
-Sarah