2008/8/9 Michel Vuijlsteke wikipedia@zog.org:
Recruitment, in my totallyunscientific opinion.
A year ago, a jazz band that won several international awards, that had an acclaimed album out (produced by a noted famous producer, no less) would have had an article on Wikipedia. Someone's first thought when coming across the band would have been "I'll see what I can find on Wikipedia", and then "Oh, hang on, no article, I'll go and do a stub".
[[Empirical (jazz band)]] is such a band. And it was recently prominently featured on BoingBoing. That alone would have been enough, in the past, to get a Wikipedia article.
As it was, I created their article myself. I know next to nothing about them except that I have their debut album and that I quite like it.
Just a year ago you could have gotten away with creating a one-paragraph stub. Any bets how long it would have taken for the article to be speedied if I hadn't provided two sources?
Any guesses as to why the article was not created sooner?
Michel Vuijlsteke
The problem with that theory is that news users haven't been able to create new articles for some time.