Well it’s a great place for sanctioned wikipedians to go. Wikipedia is having a lot of trouble keeping its editors. I don’t think it is losing them to Quora. I think it is losing them because so many good faith editors there get sanctioned for minor things, get no support once sanctioned, have no voice there once sanctioned and so the admins who ban or block them don’t see what they are doing to them.

If you get topic banned you absolutely can’t say anything about the discussion that lead to the ban or you get an even greater sanction. So you soon learn just not to talk about what happened there, no matter how unfair you think it was, no matter if you even have no idea what you did wrong. Meanwhile off wiki then all your friends sympathize and many may decide never to edit wikipedia again after what happened to you. So it is no wonder wikipedia is constantly losing good editors and not gaining that many to replace them.

So - it’s not anywhere else that’s doing that. Wikipedia is doing it to itself. It doesn’t have to, it’s just the culture that has developed there for some reason. It’s such a shame and I wish I could do something about it as the basic idea of wikipedia is so good and many parts of it are excellent and show that it can work well. But I think this is spoiled by its easy sanctioning culture and lack of any support or help for editors once sanctioned.

So - after you have encountered that sanctioning culture on wikipedia where you can be topic banned or blocked almost at the drop of a hat if you get unlucky, then writing for Quora is a huge relief.

Nobody here gets sanctioned at all unless it is for something really serious like trolling. You don’t get sanctioned for repeatedly disagreeing with the status quo. Just get downvoted, get comments on your answers, but you may get upvotes too and eventually maybe you win over the people who originally downvoted you. It’s a very different culture here

On wikipedia, I’ve seen pages of content that’s encyclopedic and with lots of citations, nearly every sentence, just deleted overnight, or rewritten with all the old material removed. I’ve had my own work removed too. This is very discouraging for an author, and especially if the new material is either plain wrong, as it seems to you, or badly written and poorly sourced, or misuses its sources.

Nevertheless I do still contribute there. But I would have written dozens of articles there if the environment had been more friendly. I can certainly write in an encyclopedic style and know how to write from a neutral point of view by presenting all the arguments in a case from the different viewpoints. I can do it, but I don’t want the material deleted, so I don’t contribute much there and do so only very cautiously.

I’ve got several mature articles that are entirely or mainly my own creation. One of my earliest, and still a favourite, about a musical scale based around an octahedron. The article has been edited by many editors since then but was originally all my work: Hexany. I wrote about half of Planetary protection , and most of Interplanetary contamination,

I recently contributed Modern Mars habitability and Present day Mars habitability analogue environments on Earth Those two had been sitting in my user space in Wikipedia for several years because of a single editor there who singlehandedly kept all material on the present day habitability of Mars out. He was one of the editors that previously deleted my content on this topic area. Now he has stopped editing wikipedia for some reason - leaving a big gap as by the end of his “tenure” there was nobody else contributing anything in the astrobiology articles I had on my watch list there. I took that opportunity to add those articles which everyone else there is fine with.

So, it’s like that.

Quora is much more fun. Wikipedia can get deadly serious at times, and you are always aware that you can be sanctioned if you make a mistake. It’s okay for newbies making relatively small changes especially. If you are lucky and contribute in a more friendly area you may encounter no problems at all. But if you really get involved in wikipedia, then unless you are lucky, you can run into aggression quickly.

While here on Quora it’s far more friendly!

It’s easier here because whatever you write, nobody else can do anything to your text.

I could spend a year working on an article in Wikipedia and then someone might delete it all and I would have to defend it against a dozen people I don’t know who may often know little about the topic.

You can even be topic banned for supporting content which is mainstream, accepted by everyone who knows anything about the topic, by an editor on wikipedia who has gathered a following who is promoting an eccentric view on the topic that probably nobody outside wikipedia would support. Not even supported by the authors they are using as sources. I just was. I protested rather verbosely, and was topic banned for my verbosity in supporting the obvious against a minority fringe view I’ve not seen outside wikipedia except in urban myths.

While here all anyone can do is to suggest changes. Or downvote your answer.

So, the main thing is, Quora is set up in such a way that you can’t be bullied by others, because your content is your own. While on Wikipedia while many areas of the encyclopedia is okay, it has an endemic problem of wikibullying in my view.

WikiBullying

If you encounter a bully on Wikipedia, as a newbie, my advice is - just back away quietly. Don’t comment on their behaviour. Don’t report them, not as a newbie. I wish I could suggest you do that, but this is fraught with danger on wikipedia. If you do, there’s a good chance you get a “boomerang” where to your bewilderment you find yourself sanctioned by them for some obscure offence you don’t even understand, and may just be made up. And these are people for whom often Wikipedia is their whole life pretty much - they can spend hours a week on these discussions and sanctioning procedures and you most likely don’t have the time and don’t understand what is going on anyway.

For an example see the experiences of Clarawood123 in my answer to What are the most frustrating aspects of being a Wikipedia editor?

This can never happen here.

Wikipedia does have lots of ways of dealing with goodnatured disagreements. Discussion, request for comment, etc. But it doesn’t really have good ways to help newbies or even experienced editors deal with wikibullies. It’s a great shame and I hope some day this can be remedied.