On 31/10/2007, Wily D wilydoppelganger@gmail.com wrote:
There's plenty of low hanging fruit for writing good starts using just teh google. In fact, I wrote one yesterday: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La Cuisinière and last friday: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Fournier_de_Belleval and the friday before that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rom%C3%A9o Beaudry and so on. It's really not very hard at all. The obiggest problem is probably the anti-redlink culture that's growing very strong, that keeps people uninformed on what needs writing.
More than anything else, the fact that writers are so strongly biased against redlinks these days is a huge reason new page creation has gone down.
It was only let to get this far because no-one was willing to make a conclusive policy pro-redlinks. The extensive use of WP:CONTEXT does not help in this way. In theory CONTEXT works because people are discouraged from linking everything, but in practice with multi-person inputs, it ends up being the absolute lowest set of links that people are willing to accept, instead of a larger variety.
Personally, as a moderately red colourblind person, I think that red text stands out just enough... I can't imagine the hassle about reading redlinked articles that I have heard from normal vision people.
Peter