Article creation (was Re: [WikiEN-l] More fodder for your editcountitis)

[Neil Harris]

Martin Richards wrote:

>
>> Go do [[Special:Newpages]] patrol some time. (Sunday afternoon and
>> evening US time are "good" for this.)  MY GOD, THE AVALANCHES OF CRAP!
>> I can fully believe we have ~2000 shoot-on-sight new page creations a
>> day.
>
>
> I have been looking at this for a while now, something that is clear 
> is that virtually all (as in ~95%) of the deleted articles (especially 
> speedies) are from anonymous users, and a lot of which aren't tests, 
> but plain old vandalism. I really think we need some kind of "votes 
> for creation" or "approved creation" or something, maybe not soon as 
> there are still vast quantities of topics we don't cover (see 
> [[Wikipedia:Wikiproject Missing encyclopedic articles]] for ~150,000 
> examples), but maybe a in year or so from now I dont think we will 
> have much choice.
>
> Martin


How about the much simpler approach of restricting page creation to 
logged-in users?
This would act as a minimal speedbump which is probably just enough to 
discourage many (most?) drive-by junk page creators, whilst still 
allowing anons to edit any existing page as freely as before.

This could be applied only to the main article space, thus allowing 
anons to create talk pages as before.

This would be similar to the current restriction of image uploads to 
logged-in users.

-- Neil