On 3/31/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Personally, I wouldn't have a problem with this. It's a lot easier to fix the 1,5 million articles we have if there's not constantly new stuff pouring in. But people will turn to Wikipedia if there's a new hurricane or massive flood or to read about a country's new prime minister or president.
These are the type of articles that need to be created and kept up-to-date as they happen for maximal effect. If we were to do this for a significant amount of time, we'd be severely lacking in articles about current events. How do you think we should handle that?
Admins can still create new articles as needed.
I called for a one-month moratorium on new articles in my blog recently (http://nonbovine-ruminations.blogspot.com/2007/03/notability-maintainability-and-quality.html). I found Kurt's comment there interesting: the German Wikipedia is apparently discussing a proposal to disable new article creation one week out of each month; this proposal is not faring well.
I suppose it is more fun to create than it is to maintain. Open source software has the same problem -- which is why there are hundreds of half-written IRC clients out there. The only way we got GIMP to 1.0 was to declare a "feature freeze" and to spend a couple of months doing nothing but killing bugs. Wikipedia needs to do essentially the same thing: stop adding new stuff until they get the old stuff organized, at least a bit more. Until they do, the bleeding will not stop.
Kelly