On 10/28/07, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
Sure, I've got a strong, factually-grounded reason why this should not be done. WP:AFC has been set up as a mechanism for articles to be submitted anonymously. The page has a big, clearly-worded instruction page at the top as to what to submit and what not to submit, far more help than one normally gets just clicking on a redlink and creating a page.
Well with all that extra help, most of the articles must be accepted, right? I mean, it gives you a step-by-step guide as to how to get an article accepted!
Not so.
Yesterday's AFC:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creati...
42 articles proposed. 3 accepted, of which 2 were redirects as proposed and one only needed redirection to an existing article. 39 garbage articles easily kept off without any chance of slipping through newpage patrol.
Well, maybe that was a fluke? Again, not so.
On the 26th, 53 proposals, of which 5 were accepted. 2 of those were redirects, leaving 3 decent articles out of 53. Other days are all similar, a few (usually very marginal) articles out of dozens of garbage ones.
And that's -with- significantly more help and instruction than the creator of a page normally gets. Anons are not creating a flood of great pages, they're creating a flood of garbage. That's already been shown by AFC. We don't need to have mainspace crapped up to prove it, the ratio there, if anything, would be worse, due to the comparative lack of instruction. If anything, require registration for a week and/or a minimum of 30-50 edits before creating pages. If you've managed to make a few dozen edits and not get yourself blocked, maybe -then- we can trust you to create pages. Pages created by new accounts and anons are almost uniformly worthless. We would do ourselves far better by freeing up known good contributors from having to constantly clean up the crapflood.
Just speaking for myself, I would not have bothered with using AFC as an anon. You can't really draw firm conclusions from AFC about the entire population of anon editors because it's self-selecting - those who *really* want an article, as opposed to those who casually think "Hey, I could start a one-para article on this thing I know" are probably more inclined to use AFC. Unsurprisingly, those are the people with vanity, spam, etc. - not those with useful articles to contribute.
I'm not saying your conclusion is wrong - just that it is difficult to reach on the basis of the evidence you've presented.
Johnleemk