David Gerard wrote:
Article creation seems to be running at about ~2% of total edits. So I don't expect a massive change in the amount of article polishing. Since a pretty high percentage of AFD is due to articles created on the day I doubt there will be much of a blip.
Mmm. I think declaring it "Article Improvement Week" will help in itself.
(And since being told "you can't create articles" will immediately make people want to create articles, there's the userspace getout. Win!)
Why can't you declare an "article improvement week" without prohibiting people from creating new articles? Volunteer work on Wikipedia is not a "bag of labor" that can be reallocated at will, and I doubt few people who would not willingly participate in an article improvement week would be convinced to do so unwillingly because of a software change that prohibits them from creating new articles they would prefer to work on instead---they would more likely simply leave for a week. I know I would probably leave for the week on principle.
-Mark