After some more thought on the origins of stub articles and a
better overview of the contents of the Swedish Wikipedia, it is
clear that very few individuals are responsible for creating large
numbers of stubs, a few years back. Now, depending on religion
(mergists, deletionists...), these should either be deleted,
improved, merged or put on lists of necessary quality
improvements. Either way, it's a lot of work and it would have
been better to have stopped those invidiuals back then. At least
we want to stop such individuals today, so the same mistake isn't
repeated while the old mess is being cleaned up.
What we want is to foster a spirit of writing better articles,
improving the one you started, before you start the next one.
But instead of increased patrolling and speedy deletions, this
could be implemented in the Mediawiki software. If a user (logged
in or IP address) tries to create a new page, their recent
contribution history could be checked, and if any of their five
most recently created articles (except redirects) are shorter
than, say, 300 bytes, they would simply be unable to create
another article. This would be a very soft kind of blocking (as
soon as you have improved your existing article, you can start the
next one), each case being completely an affair between the user
and the software, not involving opinions of individual admins.
Such an extension (is there an "article creation hook"?) could be
fully parameterized, so each community could decide where to set
the limits (5 recently created articles, 300 bytes), and what
message to show to the user who violates these limits.
Has this been suggested before? Has it been implemented? Would
it be a really bad idea to suggest this?
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se