I think a contributing factor is that Wikipedia is not particularly easy to edit, especially for non-techies. As a casual editor -- and as a seasoned techie, e

I think a contributing factor is that Wikipedia is not particularly easy to edit, especially for non-techies. As a casual editor -- and as a seasoned techie, even -- the markup language used by Wikipedia is daunting. For example, the documentation on available templates (which, incidentally, are completely different for each sub-language wiki; in fact, most non-English wikis lack a full set of templates found in the 'en' wiki) is so bad that I usually have to spend several minutes hunting down information about the "citation needed" template, because I keep forgetting it, or the ways to write a <ref> tag or even links. Every time I want to create a brand new wiki page, I have to copy another page as a starting point because of all the arcane templates, tags and conventions I need to use. The default editor mode is a mess, with a tiny proportional font used for the edit text field, no autocompletion or syntax highlighting, no "draft mode", no diff-based conflict resolution, etc. I suspect that many experienced editors probably use apps or a collection of GreaseMonkey scripts to fix the editing experience, but to casual users it's pretty unbearable. Keeping track of edited articles is also a mess, to the point of being useless. There's an Atom feed, but the item contents is just the edit description, no diff. The article history page itself is like something out of Bugzilla, designed by some Perl guy with no notion of UX, with radio buttons as a way to navigate among diffs. These little annoyances add up to the point where I hesitate before considering whether I should bother to perform an edit and create a page, dreading the technical hurdles.