Hello,
Note that I didn't check whether the content was *accurate*, merely whether it was organised, formatted etc in accordance with Wikipedia standards. As these figures indicate, the majority of new articles created during this period failed the quality check. Nearly a quarter failed so badly that they were worth deleting. This certainly accords with my previous experiences in monitoring [[Special:Newpages]].
Nice (original) research! I considered doing something similar with AfC. There, the vast majority of pages fail on the grounds of "already exists under another name", "not noteworthy", "not a dictionary", "silly" etc. Let's face it - newbies should be not be making new pages. They just don't have the concept of what belongs in Wikipedia and what doesn't.
- New articles should go somewhere outside the main
namespace until reviewed and passed. They should *not* immediately enter the main namespace.
Why stop at new articles? Why not do the same with newbie edits, or edits detected by the system to be possible vandalism. (Massive reductions of text, swear words, etc.)
- We need a simple, clearly defined set of criteria
for assessing whether an article passes the grade. Is it wikilinked? Written in English? Correctly formatted? Includes references? etc etc...
Passes the grade to be published? Add "contains sufficient definition and context". Wikilinking maybe less important?
- Reviewing editors should assess newly created
articles against these criteria. If the article passes, the article should be cleared to enter the main namespace. If not, it should be sorted into a queue to deal with whatever the problem is. For instance, an article lacking any wikilinks and incorrectly spelled should first be sorted into a "needs links" queue, then moved to a "needs spelling corrections", then finally moved to the main namespace.
Are you proposing "reviewing editors" as being a particular class of editor, akin to a "moderator"?
Because reviewing editors would necessarily need to be people with a bit of experience of editing, I would limit the ability to review and approve new articles to editors with a certain number of edits - say 500+.
Woot, I qualify.
However, any editor should be able to work on improving a queued article.
Wholly concur. I amigane a situation where some article is up to version 1593, and its *published version* is 1589. You edit the article, see version 1593, save your changes, it becomes 1594. Eventually a reviewer reviews it and publishes it - now the two versions are in sync at #1594, and can be distributed to mirrors etc.
Libel considerations aside, it might be worthwhile making "unpublished" versions available to the general public underneath massive spammy WARNING UNVERIFIED banners.
Steve