I'm hoping that we won't have too many "trick" articles in this process, or articles that should be deleted but not by CSD (the criteria are "write an article that doesn't meet the deletion criteria".
So far we've had a range from Battleships and miniaturists to Monarchs and a winger. I think we've tested the charge that a new article submitted to Wikipedia will be tagged for deletion in two minutes and is guaranteed not to last seven days. But it would be a Pyrrhic victory to respond to the press that It is still possible for a good article to be added to Wikipedia by a newbie, as we'd have to concede that enough get deleted by over-enthusiasm at CSD to constitute a problem - the press exaggerated the problem, but they didn't entirely invent it. We've also established that neither welcoming nor wikification are currently keeping up with the flow of newbies and their articles.
My own contribution has in the first sentence "was king of ****** from ***** to ***". It has yet to be marked as patrolled and I anticipate it reaching those who patrol the back of the unpatrolled newpages at some point this week.
Regards
WereSpielChequers
Message: 2 Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:52:18 -0400 From: David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] How friendly are we to Newbies? Update on the create an article as a newbie challenge To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 480eb3150910290952i5afcb259qadfdd6751246d1b3@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
It's not hard to do. Mention the unspectacular factor that claims notability in an obscure position in the middle without any details, add some foolish spam about how good they are & how they will change the world, include an email address to contact for more information, and omit references. For models, check CSD.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 4:17 AM, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 11:32 AM, WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@googlemail.com wrote:
The idea is to test the speedy deletion process with articles that shouldn't be speedy deleted.
Links to several of the articles in the process and their fates have been posted to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/Newbie_treatment
Hey, that's really cool. I've made my own lame newbie attempt to join the experiment. It's hard to write a convincing newbie stub article that you think deserves to exist, but could be dissed by a patroller acting in a hurry.
Steve