On 12/5/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Tim Starling wrote:
We can tell fairly easily whether a page will be an orphan before it is created, it's an indexed query. So we could, say, prevent creation of orphans by anons. I'm not sure what the effect would be. I can tell you that currently, 205 of the 1498 articles in [[Category:Articles that need to be wikified]] are orphans, I don't know how many were orphans when they were created.
I would say that whether or not the experiment beginning today on preventing anons from creating *any* articles works, we might try this one as well (after a couple of weeks, say) as a "softer" solution.
I'd say the proper "soft" solution is simply to be less forgiving with anonymous contributions that aren't properly references. If an anonymous contributor puts facts into the encyclopedia without sourcing them, then any user should feel free to remove those facts. I really don't see this as taking a significant amount of time for people working on the new page patrol.
With logged in users, especially ones with well established reputations of editing, you have to be more forgiving than this, of course.
But as this is all being done as an experiment I don't mind waiting a few weeks to see if it really does work miracles.
Anthony