Translation: you're not welcome unless you adhere precisely to established editors’ views and practices. There is no room for introspection, civilized discussion that questions the status quo, and hence, no room for improvement.
Flyby contributors don’t know how much effort there is to keep things going even at good enough level. It’s up to the newcomer to convince that the new opinion matters and new risk is worth taking.
Maintainers can’t distinguish between troll and flyby-contributor-never-to-be-seen-again and genius-that-will-sacrifice-everything-for-the project.
I get that you can’t convince of anything if they don’t discuss, but that means one must earn the right to discuss, by becoming part of current organisation.
Illustrative analogy from open source project (not mine).
Project had top level directories like “ext” and “external” and “vendor” (which is confusing at the first glance). Potential contributor made PR to rectify it (memory slips on how; but seemed reasonable at first glance). Owner/Maintainer rejected this help. The would be contributor got frustrated, later complained here that the project did not care about code quality and best practices and is hostile to new contributors. I see Chesterton’s fence here and a bit of entitlement on the would-be-contributor’s side.
Wikipedia explicitly does not have owners.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership_of_content>
The statement that "one must earn the right to discuss" alone has the minor problem that it is totally antithetical to the actual policies and guidelines that Wikipedia aims to adhere to.
Established old-timers have significantly more authority than newbies in any organisation.
Trust built over time matters.
A unicycle and a hula hoop have similarities.
As I said, the distinction matters. The argument by metaphor in your previous comment is off-base.
Feel free to address concretely what I wrote in my previous comment.
(Though I have doubts about the quality of any insights that might be offered; no one referring to Wikipedia as "Wiki" is informed enough about Wikipedia to be informative about it.)
Well, the wiki’s policy is irrelevant. Or only 50% relevant.
I see that the policy tries to provide some “spirit of the law” and/or hints to avoid edit wars and such, but evidently many follow the policy only in letter and just know what not to mention, i.e. to not trigger the policy. (instead of rejecting edits with “I own this” or “I know this better”, edits get rejected with “citation needed”)
> As I said, the distinction matters.
I see you sincerely believe that it does, but I’m of different opinion.
People in any group form a hierarchy, and have (frequently unwritten) “traditions”. And those are features, not bugs.
Hierarchy is not necessarily strict or formal, but it helps with coordination.
“Tradition” is the actual way how things are done. “Tradition” can be changed by policies, it may even implement the policy to the letter, but it always encompasses more than the policy contains. Because it’s almost impossible and most undesirable to have policies for each breath we take.
> Feel free to address concretely what I wrote in my previous comment.
Somebody has older account then me here and is feeling authoritative I see. Thanks for good practical illustration.
If you dismiss peoples opinion ("quality of any insights") on the basis of their choice of words or abbreviations instead of the content, it becomes really hard to assume you're arguing in good faith.
My point is that not every contributor is as welcoming as I wish they were. This is a very difficult community problem, without any obvious easy fixes, considering that the contributors can be anyone in the world, are pseudonymous volunteers, and nobody is banned from contributing unless they're being quite disruptive.
There is significant room for introspection and civilized discussion, but people also disagree about what articles should say and how, and it's impossible for everyone's preference to be met. If you ask both sides in a disagreement a newcomer to an article might say that a long-time editor of that article is being a grouchy gatekeeper, but the long-time editor might say that the newcomer is e.g. adding nonsense, is not adequately providing sources, is unhelpfully changing the scope of an article with material that would better fit somewhere else, or is outright wrong (etc.). Sometimes both of those complaints might simultaneously have some basis.