The results paint a numerical picture of a community dominated by bureaucracy. Since 2007, when the new controls began to bite, the likelihood of a new participant’s edit being immediately deleted has steadily climbed. Over the same period, the proportion of those deletions made by automated tools rather than humans grew. Unsurprisingly, the data also indicate that well-intentioned newcomers are far less likely to still be editing Wikipedia two months after their first try. ... One idea being tested offers newcomers suggestions about what to work on, steering them toward easy tasks such as copyediting articles that need it. The hope is this will give people time to gain confidence before they break a rule and experience the tough side of Wikipedia.
People want to create content, not fix other people's grammatical mistakes.
Here's another idea: Instead of figuring out new processes, badges, sandboxes, help zones, and polite ways of saying "your contribution doesn't meet notability requirements and needs at least n media citations. Please refer to Policy X before resubmitting", why not attack the hydra head on? Determine how to eliminate bureaucracy. Don't keep adding to it.
People want to create content, not fix other people's grammatical mistakes.
Hey, I'm the product manager for that work (also quoted in the article). I thought I might mention that we've A/B tested our task suggestion workflow extensively, and the answer is definitively that Wikipedians want to do both things. I can share links to all our research, which is public, if you want.
There are basically two kinds of people who sign up for Wikipedia: those with something to do in mind, and those who want a suggestion of where to start. The evidence we've gathered so far shows that many new contributors like being able to get started and learn the ropes doing something that's easy and not intimidating. They have a positive first experience editing, and then they typically move on to other tasks, having gained more confidence. We are giving people options, not requiring anyone to do N number of grammatical fixes in order to earn badges, privileges or anything of the sort.
I should also note that among more advanced editors, there is actually a popular Guild of Copyeditors that does highly-coordinated copyediting drives on Wikipedia. Not to mention all the peer review for quality that happens in other places. Never underestimate the interest of grammar nazis in fixing your comma usage. ;)
Unfortunately, bureaucracy is the only way we know to synthesize a kind of homogeneous, approximately unbiased store of knowledge like Wikipedia wants to present. Stack Overflow's gamification seems to work well--or at least better compared to Wikipedia's--so it makes sense they would try it. I bet few people can write in an unbiased way about topics they're passionate about and have achieved a great depth of knowledge in. Are you going to get a higher quality encyclopedia by taking raw, highly biased, unsourced, "bad" content and coaxing it into shape through a very contributor-affirming hand-holding process, or by simply turning away the "bad" content and the people who created it? I don't think anybody knows which method works better, but it's clear that Wikipedia's method falls into the second camp and its shortcomings are only becoming more obvious as time goes on.
I used to try fixing grammatical and typographical mistakes, and most of my changes got reverted. This was perhaps 4 years back. It was frustrating seeing ok/good content written by what seemed to be a non-native english speaker that could have been good/great content if it were cleaned up, but instead was left to rot.
People want to create content, not fix other people's grammatical mistakes.
Here's another idea: Instead of figuring out new processes, badges, sandboxes, help zones, and polite ways of saying "your contribution doesn't meet notability requirements and needs at least n media citations. Please refer to Policy X before resubmitting", why not attack the hydra head on? Determine how to eliminate bureaucracy. Don't keep adding to it.