[stoperaticless]

Maintainer stance is understandable. They are the ones taking on the risks and who will be left dealing with consequences.

Flyby contributors don’t know how much effort there is to keep things going even at good enough level. It’s up to the newcomer to convince that the new opinion matters and new risk is worth taking.

Maintainers can’t distinguish between troll and flyby-contributor-never-to-be-seen-again and genius-that-will-sacrifice-everything-for-the project.

I get that you can’t convince of anything if they don’t discuss, but that means one must earn the right to discuss, by becoming part of current organisation.

Illustrative analogy from open source project (not mine).

Project had top level directories like “ext” and “external” and “vendor” (which is confusing at the first glance). Potential contributor made PR to rectify it (memory slips on how; but seemed reasonable at first glance). Owner/Maintainer rejected this help. The would be contributor got frustrated, later complained here that the project did not care about code quality and best practices and is hostile to new contributors. I see Chesterton’s fence here and a bit of entitlement on the would-be-contributor’s side.

[cxr]

Editing Wikipedia is not the same as developing software, and they're different enough for the distinction to matter. Wikipedia is not Nupedia, and the comparison in this comment between Wikipedia and open source software maintenance is simply flawed from the start.

Wikipedia explicitly does not have owners.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership_of_content>

The statement that "one must earn the right to discuss" alone has the minor problem that it is totally antithetical to the actual policies and guidelines that Wikipedia aims to adhere to.

[stoperaticless]

Wiki, open source projects, stackoverflow and democratic country, all are different, but they definitely have similarities.

Established old-timers have significantly more authority than newbies in any organisation.

Trust built over time matters.