This is hardly a problem unique to Wikipedia, and no especially workable solutions have been proposed that I’ve seen. If routine members are denied the ability to do things like bring up deletion discussions, just because some of them might get tendentiously caught up in the bureaucracy and thereby lose sight of broader goals, that just makes the process more onerous when it is necessary, which is often.
I think the biggest problem is that the “outsiders” you are generalizing about, at least in your portrayal, are failing to realize that the “insiders” are just a bunch of individual people, and don’t stand for any unified position, conspiratorial or otherwise.
Communicating information to new users, especially ones who make little effort to learn about community norms and practices, is extremely difficult, because there is no way to force them to look at any particular explanation. Even talk page messages lovingly crafted to be as helpful as possible are going to often meet with “What, I have to spend more than 30 seconds figuring out why my changes to an article were deemed a regression? No thanks.”
Communicating information to new users, especially ones who make little effort to learn about community norms and practices, is extremely difficult, because there is no way to force them to look at any particular explanation.
Karma systems deal with this by using game dynamics. Beginners are channeled into work which supposedly educates them and indoctrinates than into community values.
I think there’s a big difference between a site whose visible product is discussion, such as Hacker News, and a site whose discussion is only in support of the visible product, like Wikipedia. Newcomers to a discussion community can easily see practices and norms at work, because the process and the results are the same thing, and are completely transparent by definition. Since much if not most of the process of writing Wikipedia is reorganizing and rewriting and cutting and polishing, without any one user having responsibility for an article, it’s not obvious just quite what contributions are most helpful, or even helpful at all.
I think the feedback (reversions with edit summaries, discussion on talk pages, comments on users’ pages) are okay, but it’s an inherently different kind of feedback than you’d get from, say, HN or Facebook or Twitter or Stack Overflow. Just comes with the territory.
I think Wikipedia could do a lot better, especially if it had more programmers working on technical improvements. But I wouldn’t guess the systems used by discussion-oriented communities could be usefully easily transferred.
I think the biggest problem is that the “outsiders” you are generalizing about, at least in your portrayal, are failing to realize that the “insiders” are just a bunch of individual people, and don’t stand for any unified position, conspiratorial or otherwise.
Communicating information to new users, especially ones who make little effort to learn about community norms and practices, is extremely difficult, because there is no way to force them to look at any particular explanation. Even talk page messages lovingly crafted to be as helpful as possible are going to often meet with “What, I have to spend more than 30 seconds figuring out why my changes to an article were deemed a regression? No thanks.”