QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Mon 26th December 2011, 3:39pm)
Content authors, cantankerous or not, do not add much value to Wikipedia. Sure, they need some content in order to maintain the appearance of an encyclopedia, but they've already got that. At this point, what matters most to them is how many people they can suck in, and cantankerous content editors don't help at all in that regard. Getting rid of them is a no-brainer.
Content authors don't mean much to the WMF, but they do mean more to Wikipedia than how many new users there are. Wikipedia has a bazillion shitty articles - we point them out on WR all the time - and it
should be more useful to improve them rather than suck in more people. Of course, they're trying (and sometimes failing) to do both at once with the university outreach programs.