Mike Godwin wrote:

I read the article in the Chronicle pretty carefully. The author's experience struck me as an example of a pattern that may account for the flattening of the growth curve in new editors as well as for some other phenomena. As you may remember, Andrew Lih conducted a presentation on "the policy thicket" at Wikimania almost five years ago. The wielding of policy by long-term editors, plus the rewriting of the policy so that it is used to undercut NPOV rather than preserve it, strikes me as worth talking about.

Mike, thanks for the re-mention, and that same thing definitely stuck out to me.

We have hit upon perhaps the perfect Achilles Hell of Wikipedia with this case -- conscientious, non-combative user tries to reason with the veteran editor crowd and gets rebuffed. After two years comes back with well-crafted scholarship to support his case but gets tossed the book of overly-broad policy that has accumulated in the interest of combating specific cases of minority and fringe content.

What winds up happening is that it filters out legitimate contributions and potential excellent contributors.

I've buried the lede, but tomorrow (Wednesday) I'll be on NPR's Talk of the Nation radio show with Timothy Messer-Kruse himself, to talk about his experiences.

Tune in, and feel free to send questions/comments my way (that are helpful!)

-Andrew