That sounds like a great idea. Since the "well-meaning awful" often comes from people who might not know where to look for such templates, maybe it would be a good idea to provide a link in the "Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name" template, to the edit page, or maybe provide a button that inserts that template (similar to the buttons that help you insert bolded text, italicised text, signatures, and so on).
Cheers,
James
David Gerard wrote:
I wrote this in passing on wikitech-l and thought I might run it past wikien-l as an idea.
Go on new article patrol. You'll see decent stuff from old hands, but a lot of new stuff is awful. Well-meaning awful, but awful.
When the page for creating a new article comes up, would it be useful to include an article skeleton? Something like the following:
'''Article name''' is ...
Detail on Article name ...
Further detail on Article name ...
==References==
*List your sources here.
==External links==
*List relevant external links that are not already references.
The idea is that this isn't compulsory at all - but may be a helpful starter for newbies.
An analogy is writing bug reports in Bugzilla. You can more or less write something freeform, but the avg. quality of Mozilla's bug reports went way up when they started using a default reporting form (Bugzilla Helper) which set out a good bug report step by step.
The above resembles my idea of how to write a short article (see my recent creations [[Federated Naming Service]] and [[LBX]] for how I write new short articles). Others will doubtless have their own ideas.
Is this a useful idea? Do new article patrollers think it will help?
- d.
ps: both articles named above were cases of "I wonder what that actually is, oh! there's no articles yet, I think I'll find out and write them up." Helped by being temporarily stuck on dialup, which gives one more writing time than reading time.
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