If knowing the fairly simple rules of the site you are participating in counts as fanatic dedication, I weep for the internet.

Do you feel one has to be fanatically dedicated to HN to know why "reply" links don't always appear right away?

The history of the problem with WP is not that there's a lack of people willing to provide quality participation. Everyone from professional authors to nuclear physicists have been screwed by the bureaucratic psychosis that pervades contributing to WP.

Almost by definition, high quality participants are such because they have spent an inordinate amount of time in their area of expertise. They don't have the time to deal with "the WP way", Even contributing an article to WP is a "big deal" for these kinds of people because of the time it takes to do it.

But because WP invariably turns almost any submission, no matter the quality, into a situation of content defense, quality participants simply don't have the time to:

a) waste defending perfectly good material b) waste learning the ins and outs of WP on how to defend the perfectly good material and manage it through a multi-week AfD process -- possibly several times.

Sure there's lots of junk that ends up submitted to WP, and if you read through the comments here, nobody is really up in arms about that, it's when the actual high quality material (which might represent dozens or hundreds of hours of high quality work) is tossed out because some WP editor has trouble functioning in society and decided that they couldn't handle invaders on their patch of electrons that we end up with the problem you see here.

So no, the only ones who are able to have any sort of impact on WP are the ones who are able to have fanatical dedication to learning the ins and outs of WP and are able to manage an edit through the tortured, arbitrary and capricious bureaucratic processes that define WP today.

That is a lot of words with little evidence.

This discussion resulted from a specific blog post about a specific article. Do you consider the Jessie Stricchiola article to be "actual high quality material"?

What is your proposed alternative process, and how does it help to build a useful, reasonably accurate encyclopedia?

If Wikipedia's process is so bad, why hasn't anyone forked the contest and done it over better?

I haven't ever seen quality contribution in scientific area to be rejected. The only people screwed by the "bureaucratic psychosis" are the ones who try to use Wikipedia as a way of self-promotion, which shows that the process works.