Make a good-faith, high-quality edit to a page, and see how long the edit is allowed to stand.

I guess I haven't found this, but I admittedly don't try to edit [[George W. Bush]] or articles like that. The common case for me is crickets: I create an article on, say, a 19th-century German author who had a de.wikipedia article but no en.wikipedia one yet. Short article, maybe 2 paragraphs, one reference. The usual outcome is that I hear from nobody about the article ever again. No complaints, no praise, no reverts, no improvements, no anything at all. Exceptions: 1) it might get tagged as an "orphan" if nothing links in; and 2) some people may fiddle with the window dressing, adding/modifying categories and infoboxes and whatnot. Once in a long while someone will come in and expand it greatly, and that's usually positive.

My recent hobby has been articles about archaeological sites, and that has the same crickets-type feeling. So I'm wondering what new users are editing that they get any comment at all, much less angry ones! In my experience picking up a book and creating short new articles that reference the book is more than enough following-the-policies to avoid complaints about your articles, assuming it's some kind of legit reference book.

If anything, there are a lot of edits that should be challenged that aren't, with the bar for getting spam into Wikipedia not really that high. I know of at least one university that actually has a paid staff member creating total PR-puff-piece articles about that university's professors, and few of them get challenged, despite the fact that they read pretty much like a PR person wrote them, and are "cited" mainly to the subject's own articles and university press releases. Some academics edit Wikipedia solely to insert references to their own papers in articles. There are also rumors that publishing companies have people inserting references to the publisher's recent books, as a form of advertising rather than because they in good faith think it'll improve the article. Heck, check out the External Links section on popular vacation destinations; around 20-30% of them are full of travel spam, which isn't even that subtle, and yet manages to get in. Maybe all those false-negatives (not reverted) are worth not having more false positives, but it's a hard problem overall in both directions imo.

Really general articles, like [[global warming]], do have more fundamental problems, but I think some of them are just unavoidable. With anything controversial, there will be 50 different opinions about how the article should go, and the only way to reach a compromise is to discuss it and try to figure out how to best organize the material, split some material out to subsidiary articles, word controversial points delicately, etc. If someone who didn't read that discussion comes in and makes an edit, it's likely to be problematic on one way or another. I don't think that's even Wikipedia-specific; that's how things work when it comes to controversial subjects when people are writing academic review papers, subject-matter-specific encyclopedias, Linux kernel contributions, etc. Wikipedia's article on global warming is at least probably less bureaucratic to contribute to than the IPCC report is. ;-)

[edit: The above doesn't mean I don't think that there are problems with Wikipedia, which I do, but I think they're not quite as "it's a completely horrible community" as is often suggested. Some of the things, like reaching consensus on a controversial subject, are just inherently hard; other things that are broken for no good reason should indeed be fixed, others depend strongly on what kinds of articles you create, etc. Overall Wikipedia's newbie-friendliness actually seems pretty good relative to other collaborative projects I've been involved in, though.]