Creating Wikipedia edits is a very complex task. Lots of papers were written about the topic in the past. The good news is, that Wikipedia edits can be formalized and repeated over and over again. The common Wikipedia edit contains of two steps: creating keypoints and writing prose text.
Unfortunately, most long term Wikipedia authors are combining these steps into a single edit. They submitting the changes to an article without further comments. This behavior makes it harder for the newbies to create edits by their own. The better idea is to assume, that the newbie has no experience with WIkipedia at all and likes to contribute to the project in a predictable way. That means, without producing conflicts and without getting banned because of false edits.
An easy to follow edit strategy contains of the described two step pipeline. In step 1 the newbie is posting keypoints for an article to the discussion page and in step 2 he converts these keypoints into full sentences. The good news is, that this strategy is described under the term “creating powerpoint presentation” Since decades. A powerpoint presentation contains of the same steps. In step 1 the author prepares the presentation at home and writes down the keypoints to the slides. In step 2 he helds the presentation which is equal to convert the self created keypoints into natural speech which contains of full sentences. The second step is done in front of the audience. That means, the lecturer not only reads the keypoints loud, but he is using the keypoints to talk about the subject.
Its interesting to know that the two step pipeline for creating powerpoint presentation is the international defacto standard. All the presentations in the world contains of written keypoints stored in the slides plus the oral presentation in which the speaker formulates full sentences. Its not possible to make a presentation in a different way.
Its a bit surprising that in the Wikipedia ecosystem this two step workflow is not known. In the official help section the steps are not mentioned. Instead the official tutorials are assuming that an edit is the smallest item which can't be divided into sub tasks. This assumption is wrong. A wikipedia edit is equal to submit prose text to Wikipedia which is annotated with bibliographic references. Before this prose text can be added to an article, the author needs a preparation step. He has to read through the existing information and he has to make some keypoints what he has read in the papers.
Most authors are storing this prestep either on their local harddrive or they are trained well enough to not need such a step. For newbies the recommendation is, to submit the created keypoints to the talk page, because this helps to get a better overview. Newbies are allowed to make mistakes, which can be located in two steps. Either the newbie struggles in making notes by reading existing information. Or the newbie isn't able to formulate the self-created keypoints into prose text. Getting feedback at which step exactly the error was introduced will help a lot.
That means, it is not enough to judge that a certain edit is wrong. But the more elaborated question is, if the creation of keypoints was a problem or the transfer of keypoints into prose text.
Well written articles
Let us analyze the existing articles in Wikipedia. What they have in common is, that they are written for the enduser. They are formulated in prose text and they are equipped with bibliographic references. A wikipedia article and a recorded powerpoint presentation have much in common. They can be read/listen from start to end and in most cases the text makes sense.
What is not given by the average Wikipedia article are the presteps until the article was created. A naive assumption is, that an article is created by smaller edits. But this definition hides the fact, that the individual authors are using their local harddrive to prepare the edits. The prepation steps on the local harddrive is never uploaded to Wikipedia, therefor its much harder for the newbies to reproduce the steps for creating articles by their own.
The interesting point is, that in the normal tutorials about creating academic text the prestep of notetaking is described in detail. Nearly 100% of the manuals in which the process of creating academic presentations and academic papers is described, the user is asked to create first the keypoints and then formulate the prose text. It's not very difficult to transfer this tutorial for creating Wikipedia articles. The reason why this is not made in existing Wikipedia tutorials is, because the average long term Wikipedia author is already familiar with academic note taking. For the Wikipedia expert there is no need to talk about creating notes, because this step is assumed. This untold assumption makes it harder for newbies to do the same what Wikipedia experts are doing. What the newbies are doing is not making notes, but they think its possible to create on the fly edits.
Let us describe the imaginary on-the-fly edit in detail. On the fly means, that an edit can't be divided into substeps. Somebody reads a fact in a book, and adds this fact to Wikipedia by submitting an edit. This workflow is described in existing Wikipedia edits. The problem is, that in the reality it won't work. Especially not for newbies. The reason is, that the subjects are too complicated, the quality standards in Wikipedia are too high and the newbie isn't familiar with academic writing. The result is that an on-the-fly edit will become a reason why the newbie get banned.
Two step edit pipeline
The recommended edit workflow is much easier to master. Creating keypoints from existing academic papers is not very complicated. The user has to write down important facts and he makes a note from which paper the information comes from. Training this behavior is not very advanced. The second step in the overall pipeline is also easy to master. Taking existing keypoints and convert them into prose text is something which has to do with academic writing. The facts and the literature are given in advance and what the user has to do is formulate the facts in an easy to read paragraph.
The interesting point is, that after combining both steps the result is a high quality Wikipedia edit, which is accepted by the admins. A win win situation means, that such an edit make sense for the newbie and the admins at the same time. The newbie is proud because he has edited in the Wikipedia, while the admin is happy, because existing articles were updated.
A good starting exercise for Wikipedia newbies is to focus only on making notes. The task is, to take 10 existing articles and post keypoints to the talk page. That means, the newbie isn't creating real edits, but he is posting only keypoints to the talk page. The most interesting effect is, that none of these keypoints gets deleted from the talk page. Because the talk page is the perfect place for storing the preparation notes.
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