I'm appreciative that we're having this conversation - not in the sense that I'm happy with the status quo, but I'm glad that some of us are continuing to work on our persistent difficulties with contributor retention, civility, and diversity.
I've spent several hours on ENWP recently, and I've been surprised by the willingness of people to revert good-faith edits, sometimes with blunt commentary or with no explanation. I can understand how a newbie who experienced even one of these incidents would find it to be unpleasant, intimidating, or discouraging. Based on these experiences, I've decided that I should coach newbies to avoid taking reversions personally if their original contributions were in good faith.
I agree with Jonathan Morgan that WP:NOTSOCIAL can be overused.
Kerry, I appreciate your suggestions about about cultural change. I can think of two ways to influence culture on English Wikipedia in large-scale ways.
1. I think that there should be more and higher-quality training and continuing education for administrators in topics like policies, conflict resolution, communications skills, legal issues, and setting good examples. I think that these trainings would be one way through which cultural change could gradually happen over time. For what it's worth, I think that there are many excellent administrators who do a lot of good work (which can be tedious and/or stressful) with little appreciation. Also, my impression is that ENWP Arbcom has become more willing over the years to remove admin privileges from admins who misuse their tools. I recall having a discussion awhile back with Rosie on the topic of training for administrators, and I'm adding her to this email chain as an invitation for her to participate in this discussion. I think that offering training to administrators could be helpful in facilitating changes to ENWP culture.
2. I think that I can encourage civil participation in ENWP in the context of my training project https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Rapid/Pine/Continuation_of_educational_video_and_website_project that I'm hoping that WMF will continue to fund. ENWP is a complex and sometimes emotionally difficult environment, and I'm trying to set a tone in the online training materials that is encouraging. I hope to teach newbies about the goals of Wikipedia as well as policies, how to use tools, and Wikipedia culture. I am hopeful that the online training materials will improve the confidence of new contributors, improve the retention of new contributors, and help new editors to increase the quality and quantity of their contributions. I hope that early portions of the project will be well received and that, over time and if the project is successful as it incrementally increases in scale and reach, that it will influence the overall culture of ENWP to be more civil.
Regards,