Accept, decline, postpone: How newcomer productivity is reduced in English Wikipedia by pre-publication review

Wikipedia needs to attract and retain newcomers while also increasing the quality of its content. Yet new Wikipedia users are disproportionately affected by the quality assur-ance mechanisms designed to thwart spammers and pro-moters. English Wikipedia’s Articles for Creation provides a protected space for drafting new articles, which are reviewed against minimum quality guidelines before they are pub-lished. In this study we explore how this drafting process has affected the productivity of newcomers in Wikipedia. Us-ing a mixed qualitative and quantitative approach, we show how the process’s pre-publication review, which is intended to improve the success of newcomers, in fact decreases new-comer productivity in English Wikipedia and offer recom-mendations for system designers