Communal enabling of quality

I would not disagree with saying that content creation is not valued high enough, but as a major content creator, I may be somewhat biased here :>

Anonymous users certainly can be high quality contributors. The problem is two fold: 1) when anonymous users quarrel with/harass non-anonymous experts 2) when anonymous experts lack incentive to become non-anonymous, while the fact that we have non-anonymous, verifiable experts would boost Wikipedia standing in the eyes of its readers.

Wiki-erosion occurs everywhere; you make an interesting point that it would be larger in smaller communities than in the larger ones - I am not necessarily convinced by it. In smaller communities, there is also less editor who can contribute to erosion. You are assuming that as community grows, the ratio of experts to non-experts improves - I am not necessarily convinced it is the case. That said, I do think we should be encouraging content translation and editor migration into English Wikipedia (the biggest, the best...). Invinting quality editors from lesser project will improve our quality, but in the end, its a zero sum game (they write for us - they don't write for their projects).

"Quality users don't contribute to wiki-projects because they want to change policy, but because they want to show the world their knowledge. What all wiki-users crave for is some sort of 'applause'". Certainly. This is why positive reinforcement is important, and negative reinforcement is so bad (IMHO, the major cause for vanishing of editors).

If we classify POV-pushers as vandals, than I agree, vandals are a problem. I meant the the "wheely on wheels" or "YOU SUCK" type of vandals are a non-issue; I think we agree on that :) Discussing the type of advanced vandals, I think there are two groups, both dangerous to quality, but one of them much more than the others. The first group are POV pushers who don't engage in harassment of their opponents, the other group does. The first group can be controlled by the community, as other than being slightly annoying they don't cause other editors to leave. It is the other group - the "true believers" who POV push and harass their opponents, often resulting in their burning out and leaving - that is a serious problems (as they cause quality contributors to disappear). --Piotrus 20:08, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

@Piotrus: about wiki-erosion: it is indeed also dependent on the amount of 'bad edits', on the project size. However, this only determines the erosion rate. So, at the English Wikipedia the erosion rate is higher than on the Greek Wikipedia, because there are more edits (on average of course, having patrolled both projects for vandalism I can assure you there's more vandalism at wp-el than at wp-en at some specific times of the day ;-) ). Sadly, this fact doesn't help. I assume Wiki-erosion is a hyperbolic function with time. It levels the quality of content to a certain level. That level is (in my assumption) directly related to the amount of specialist knowledge in a community. Therefore, even though it will take (on average) much more time to erode quality at wp-sk, the erosion will in the end be way more destructive than at wp-en.