On 4/1/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 3/31/07, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
Locking down new article creation while we do a cleanup is sensible; Afd would be less like a sewerage drain and we could then judge the status of the cleanup by the, hopefully diminishing, number of Afds being raised.
Or AfD could be shut off too, starting one week after article creation is shut off.
We have enough crap already to keep Afd going for quite a while. My preference is too keep Afd running because I'm concerned that in its absence a lot of articles will be deleted using CSD. Even when justified, a prod type approach to deletion only notifies the existing editors. If the contributors who care are not regulars, the article will slip down the drain. WP:AFD has a sharp edge and related WikiProject mechanisms such as delsorting are an effective way to involve contributors that would not otherwise have been aware the article existed. It is that type of article that a cleanup effort needs to cater for.
I don't see the point of creating another suitable system of doing what AFD is intended to do: gathering consensus for deletion. Turning off the firehose will make AFD a happy place where we can take our time and focus on researching odd articles, cleaning up unsourced statements, and removing the articles that have no place on Wikipedia.
During this time, creation of new articles could be restricted to admins, and non-admins could use WP:AFC.
They could use it as a temporary storage place, but if you're going to let people submit new articles through WP:AFC and then have admins create new articles based on those submissions, it seems you're just redirecting efforts from one type of creation to another, and adding more work in the process.
In the event of a lock down, AFC could be restricted to a community defined criteria for new articles that are considered necessary during this period, e.g. current events. The rest can be rejected out of hand by ordinary editors before an admin needs to see it.
AFC would see more traffic, but it would be a pragmatic way to turn the hose down to a well defined trickle that can be adjusted as required to deal with new situations as they arise.
-- John