Elisabeth Bauer wrote:
For the problem of newbies which Timwi brought up: I think that can be handled the same way the community greets newbies - we can encourage people to add newbies to their trustlist after good contributions and it can be turned into a tool to make feel people welcome rather than excluded from a circle of "oldies": "Oh, someone added me to his trustlist" - the first step of an admin candidature?.
Of course I'm aware that the feature could be used that way, and that attempts can be made to encourage the community to follow this kind of standard. However, in practice I firmly believe that people won't do that.
Things aren't objective, you know. From the point of view of the community, many inexperienced users are vandals at first, or the socially not-so-competent appear like mentally disturbed people or something of the sort. The experienced users won't hesitate to try to get rid of them, under the belief that it's in the interest of the community.
The more tools there are to enable this sort of behaviour, the more the community of a particular Wikipedia (or other Wikimedia project) will turn into a static group of permanent insiders who welcome very few newbies.
Timwi