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.