Interesting blog post by Gene McKenna: Bullypedia, A Wikipedian Who's Tired of Getting Beat Up. The topic is Wikipedia's treatment of newbies, and some supporting evidence has been collected in this on-Wikipedia experiment.
In a related item, I asked a few friends whether and how the Kick Ass Curve, a construct originally proposed for assessing coolness of programming languages, could be applied to people's Wikipedia careers. An insightful response came from Alexia Death, and here it is:
Nope. Wickipedi[a] does not start with "this sucks" phase. It starts with "WOW, awesome. I can do things here!" evolves to "Ok, there's some catches, but I can cope." and ends in "This place is f*cking nuts. I quit."
Evidently, Wikipedia's culture has descended into a Manichean battle between "us defenders of Wikipedia" and "them newbies, presumed vandals". Because only people who aren't chased away speak up in Wikipedia, there is a bias encouraging misidentification of newbies as vandals and chasing them away before they become visible. Moreover, people who chase away newbies get socially rewarded for "standing up to them vandals".
