Dycedarg <darthvader1219(a)gmail.com> writes:
On 3/31/07, Gwern Branwen <gwern0(a)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.
--
Gwern
Inquiring minds want to know.