If only people spent more time reducing the backlog on
requested
articles. Those wouldn't be half as controversial as roads and schools
and help to improve the coverage of Wikipedia. It's not as if they're
writing what they know about anyway, or those road articles would be
near FA instead of stubs.
Instead of fussing about improving the AfD process, I'd like to give
some thought to improving the article _request_ process. Right now
it's actually quite difficult, as you're expected to thread your way
through a deeply nested Roget's-Thesaurus-like logical organization
of the sum of human knowledge to find the place to insert a request.
I'd like _requesting_ an article to be truly as easy as _creating_
one. That is, I'd a link or button which automatically adds your
request to some list somewhere... and lets other people sort 'em out
into categories.
I honestly feel that many problem substubs--the ones which give
virtually no information that is not in their titles--should be
treated either in one of two ways. Many substubs look to me like good-
faith efforts to point out a topic that someone would like covered--
but does not have the time or the skills to make a usable start on.
If a stub is not a usable launching pad for an article, then it does
not serve any function other than pointing out the absence of an
article on a worthy topic. It is, then, not an article, not a stub,
not the start of an article--it is an article request made in an
inappropriate way.
I think the appropriate disposition of such main-namespace-pages is
to delete them from the main namespace and re-enter them as article
requests.
--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith(a)verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at
http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/