For reasons like these, whenever I see "please give me money" Wikipedia commercials, I just say yea....Nope!!
I find many people people who dismiss wikipedia entirely did make that good faith effort to understand and contribute.
They gave up after
- writing articles (with sources) about early 20th C Olympic athletes which were bulk deleted as not notable
- making small changes to articles to fix spelling, grammar, or style. Each change required extensive reading of the MoS to get right. Almost every change was reverted within minutes to the previous version by someone using twinkle, or some auto revert tool, or someone with an image of a police-officer style "vandal patrol". (Some of the fixes were clearly fixes from something incorrect to correct. A few of them were matters of style, bringing things into compliance with the MoS, or making something consistent with the rest of the page.) Worse than having the changes reverted was to sometimes have a warning templated to their talk page.
- the hatred for people who edit without making accounts.
- a bizarre process of user name review after the username was deemed "confusing". (Note the software has hard coded limits on what can become a username; further there are a bunch of filters to prevent certain words being used). The username was not similar to any wikipedian username, nor to any function or process of wikipedia, nor to any kid of role account (real or otherwise.) What could the name be confused with? This, coupled with hatred for IP editing, lead to death.
So, now, we both have our anecdotes about people who've had poor experiences with wikipedia.
Yours is interesting. Creating an article about yourself is clearly a bad idea. But how did his experience end up with him hating wikipedia, and not being pleased that wikipedia has strong process in place to prevent odd biases? Why is it acceptable to chase off expert users just because they've made a mistake? Why do you assume he made no good faith effort to contribute, and not that he made a mistake, and tried to contribute, and got chased off by over vigorous editors.
When I would suggest that it might be better to start editing in some other area not directly theirs, for example start with important classic theorems in theoretical CS, and that kind of thing, the response was a less direct version of: I have more important things to do than write random articles for free, and anyway there are already good textbooks that cover those theorems.
(Not all my experiences with academics are bad in that regard, but I've found that, partly due to academic incentives, most just don't have the time/interest to write something that doesn't contribute to their career advancement. There are definite exceptions, though, especially among profs with the luxury of already being tenured.)
One thing that is really good is the much better way that WP tries to engage with college projects.
Sometimes a lecturer will have an idea to get students to edit WP. This used to end badly for all concerned. WP now has much nicer ways to meet new editors, and encourage them into better ways of editing.
Every hair on Buffy Summer's head has an article on Wikipedia. The above is not going to create a better encyclopedia, it is going to create an elitist, insular clique.
Editors on the other hand, have a very simple payoff: power.
(Interestingly, this almost never comes up in the mathematics articles. There are quite a few mathematicians who edit Wikipedia, and they tend to be quite scrupulous about that kind of thing.)
Self-interest is something to be harnessed and channeled to promote a greater good (better kernel code, more article contributions), not something to be chased away.
The issue is that without paying people, you aren't going to get a lot of people who aren't emotionally invested to bother contributing the Wikipedia.