Daniel Mayer wrote:
Looking at the issue, it would seem that making it a bit more difficult for anons to create new pages (or at least sub-200 byte pages) would solve a large part of the problem.
But this "if people can potentially do something wrong, make it impossible" is exactly the sort of thinking that leads to the "conclusion" that wiki will never work, or that proprietary is clearly better than open-source.
Anons will still be able to edit and at this point *improving* the articles we already have should be encouraged over creating more tiny articles.
No, not at all: Do you really think someone will go "Oh my, I can't create this new article. Why, in that case, I'll go and improve an existing article!" Certainly not. It would discourage the creation of very short pages (including legitimate ones), but it would neither encourage the improvement of articles, nor (this is important) will it discourage the creation of pages containing rubbish.
With well over 300,000 articles, the English Wikipedia no longer needs to do concentrate on that so much. We already have too many seeds for the amount of fertilizer and water on hand.
I don't think we have "too many", and I don't think we could ever have "too many". It's not like having a million stubs and 100,000 full articles would be worse than only half a million stubs and 100,000 full articles. In other words: It's not like more stubs meant less full articles. The English Wikipedia doesn't need to focus on creating stubs, but why lessen it?
Timwi