Steve Bennett wrote:
Sometimes barriers to participation *are* a good thing. Various online communities have noticed that the harder you make it to participate, the better quality participants you get.
OTOH, Wikipedia explicitly wants contributions from *everyone*, even if they are 14 and have trouble spelling Pokémon...
Well, actually, no we do not want those. I agree with you about barriers to participation.
But the problem is: wikitext as a barrier to participation is not particularly effective: it is too broad, and too narrow.
It does not generally exclude the wired generation of 14 year old pokemon fans who grew up on the web. It does generally exclude scholars of ancient Chinese poetry.
Better to use a different filter, like the "block" function in the software, I think.