Feedback from New Editors
I also showed up and edited a few pages. One, the page for the CETME Model C, got completely re-written to be about the company, rather than the rifle. Did the old (useful) information get moved to a sub-page? Nope. Just deleted.
Welcome to Wikipedia.
You can tell by my editing history since then how successful that welcome was. Did I make some newbie mistakes? Sure. Did anyone offer to help correct them? Nope. I'd like to go back and make the CETME page useful at some point, but where's the payoff? At the time it was pretty obvious to me that my contribution was not welcome.
Wikipedia's useful, but take a look at the Metafilter discussion page about this topic if you want to see some comments from other editors that have not been retained. I'd still like to help wikipedia succeed, but I think the fifteen or twenty minutes I spent putting this reply together is about all I'm willing to contribute at this point.
I had similar issues with communication. If you read a bit further, you'll see this post, which was the first I'd been made aware that this lack of communication was not the accepted norm.