Is it possible that the opportunities to make quality edits has decreased as wikipedia has matured?
What I have in mind is the possibility that topics that haven't been well written out are like low-hanging fruit and are easy to positively contribute to. As wikipedia has expanded, that low hanging fruit has disappeared to some extent, and thus new editors have fewer opportunities to actually provide quality edits.
This explanation does not place blame on either newbies or pre-existing users who are "content cops". Instead, it proposes that the difficulty of providing a "golden" edit increases as we move forward in time. If that's a problem (debatable, since it means wikipedia as a product is better than it was previously) then it strikes me as a difficult one to solve.