Dycedarg darthvader1219@gmail.com writes:
On 3/31/07, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
This is not a good idea. Haven't we learned anything from
locking
down *anonymous* page creation, and from the constant, and people-pissing-off, mess that is Articles for Creation? It's
not a
success by any standards - it's led to burnt out editors,
deeply
frustrated and well-meaning outsiders, and an arcane submission process that is slow, glitchy, and doesn't scale! There is no evidence whatsoever that AfC has helped Wikipedia: no evidence that it has encouraged people to focus on articles.
And now you want to disable page creation for everyone except admins? Besides the obvious aspect of adding yet another thing only admins and other higher ups can do, with ramifications for the culture and legally (if this goes through, and admins have
to
manually approve each article, will Wikipedia pass from being a host capable of claiming DMCA safe harbor to a publisher exercising editorial control and discretion over posting of new articles?), this simply won't scale. There are only what, 1100 admins, and how many of them are active? 900? Admins are
already
kind of busy with deletions and page moves and other sort of processes which are already too often backlogged (and related stuff like OTRS). We should be very very reluctant to propose
any
new process which could dump literally thousands of entries a
day
onto their collective laps.
This is pretty much a complete misinterpretation of the
proposal.
Let me outline it for you: A. This would be a very temporary change. This would last for a
few months
in an attempt to rejuvenate clean-up efforts, and then go away
forever.
B. This would not be an attempt to filter all new pages through
the admins
using some uber-beefed up AfC. There would be no new articles
whatsoever.
Zero. Zip. Nada. The only very few and far between exceptions
would be those
necessary to maintain our coverage of recent events, such as
hurricanes,
floods, wars, and other natural/not so natural disasters. Admins
would only
make new pages if it was patently obvious that we need such an
article
immediately. Any request for an article that is not necessary
for such
coverage would be ignored and deleted on sight.
I would agree that the overall number of edits would drop as
people who
typically only create new pages took a wikibreak. But I believe
that enough
would remain that the concentration of their efforts on the
remaining
articles could be of a large amount of benefit. In fact: Even if
the amount
of edits improving current articles remained constant, and no
work was
redirected at all, the fact that all the work that usually goes
into
stubbifying, prodding, CSDing, AfDing, wikifying, and all the
rest of what
is necessary to make the brand new articles serviceable could
now instead be
devoted to making the rest of the encyclopedia better, means
that in my
opinion the over-all result would be positive. If anyone simply
can't wait
another second before starting work on a new article, than they
can make it
in their userspace and work on it until they can put it in
mainspace again.
The draft will no doubt be all the better for it anyway.
--
Dycedarg
As another editor has pointed out, temporary things which affect the entire wiki have a way of becoming permanent.
Even if it truly turns out to be temporary, we already have good reason to believe that it would not do any good at all
As for the drop: it is obvious to foresee, but do you really think that the shift of effort will be somehow so astronomically valuable as to compensate for the certain loss of thousands of man-hours, both temporarily/for the duration of the lockdown and long-term as people leave to never return and other people simply avoid ever joining? This is either extraordinarily optimistic or extraordinarily paranoid.
There are many considerations here: legal, cultural, PR (there is no way to spin this positively), and so on. All of them militate against this proposal, and only fluffy hopes that it really would be a net benefit are offered in return.