On 3/31/07, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
To be honest, I don't think article creation is stealing much effort into other areas. Most users almost always edit existing articles. So if we can't expect efforts to be redirected, this won't help us much at all.
A new article doesn't just take up the time of the person who created it. It also takes up the time of everyone who reads the new article looking for problems, who edits the new article, who categorizes the new article, who nominates the new article for deletion, who discusses the deletion, etc.
At about 2500 new articles in a day (and that's the ones that survive), that's a lot of redirected effort. Wikipedia has 1.7 million articles. 2500*3 months*30 days/1.7 million=13%, for an idea of how useful that redirected effort could be, *if* there were some way to use it effectively.
One possibility for increasing the effectiveness of the redirection could be to redirect Special:newpages to a list of 2500 random articles selected each day (perhaps even more effectively, 100 articles selected each hour). [[Wikipedia:New pages patrol]] could likewise be temporarily redirected.
I dunno, it might help. I don't really like the idea, but 3 months isn't that long.
Anthony