Thanks Jason. I enjoyed reading this, though the conclusions remind me of _Seeing Like a State_. Not all edits, editors, and subcommunities are equal. Trying to shift about contributors en masse in a way that is convenient for large organizations (or for those of us who like crunching large datasets :) can be a total failure in practice.
Let's set up a new space where we can experiment with fast influxes of newbies. The current large projects are not suited for this.
If we create a new space (workspace, namespace, knowledgespace) for people to develop a different sort of knowledge, or in a different way, that would be amenable to participation by tens of thousands of new users and would not directly interfere with existing workflows: then a new founder effect, tone, and creator network could develop in tandem with existing communities. In that scenario, we could have a surge of new editors, and could perhaps help them find one another and form groups and figure things out as they go. And these could be recruited specifically from communities that currently are unwelcome or feel underrepresented.
If we want to prevent some groups from 'taking charge' and blocking or pushing out groups they don't agree with, this new workspace might benefit from supporting multiple drafts of the same idea, or multiple separate groups that can all have their own policies. The current framework on the larger wikis of One Complete System, having lots of policy to read before getting involved, and veterans chastising newbies for getting things wrong, is not amenable to any rapid influx.
SJ