Keegan Paul wrote:
People truly do have no clue about how to edit or the community and how it functions. Actually, I don't think the functionality of the community can be described. Folks are amazed to be told that they can edit willy nilly, make an account and all that. For all our popularity worldwide the vast majority of the consumers have no idea (I realize I'm preaching to the choir) until these news stories invoke interest. So, what to do about it? How to not bite?
It's a big topic, obviously, but this book written by a few Wikipedians is probably the best introduction I've found: http://howwikipediaworks.com/
Of course, not everyone will go off and read a book. But, I mean, it's a fairly large community, engaged in a fairly large project (one that's never been attempted at this scale, actually), so some amount of effort to fully understand what's going on is inevitable. What we really want is: a much shorter version of that book, that somehow covers an even larger breadth of information. ;-)
It's tricky. I mean, we're not just teaching people about Wikipedia itself when we explain how to edit Wikipedia, but about many other fields of knowledge that they may or may not already have any grounding in, which we've adapted in our practices (and which many of us have learned as we go). The idea of tertiary-source summaries vs. original research; what constitutes original research in various areas; what a neutral tone sounds like; what scholarly citation looks like; how to evaluate the reliability of sources; how to spot surprising claims that need citations; how to write in a sort of fractal summary style; etc.
Some of this is slowly seeping out into the wider culture, which may make the acculturation process easier if lots of people coming in already know certain things. The widespread outside-Wikipedia use of "[citation needed]", often in a way reasonably close to what we usually mean by it, is one example (and actually imo good for knowledge in general--- journalists in particular are increasingly getting the "[citation needed]" thrown at them when they make questionable-and-unsupported claims).
-Mark