Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner(a)gmail.com> writes:
Many of the proposals to "fix" Wikipedia of
late have seemed to
take
as a premise that what we've done is wrong. I,
personally,
disagree.
I think we've got a pretty good encyclopedia. It
needs work, but
it's
good enough to go public with, which, thank God, since
we went
public
with it. Sensible users can use it well.
But if we really do want to speed up its improvement (which I
can
take or leave, but everyone else seems desperate to
take it)...
Why don't we lock new article creation in the main namespace
entirely
for three months? Or six months? Demand that people
fix existing
articles.
Anything that's absolutely vital that comes into being in those
months will still be possible to write about in a few months, so
there's no real rush. And a lot of the crap that we create by
reflex
will not get created and be pleasantly forgotten
about. (Brian
Peppers, anyone?) And we could easily make the red page text
read
something like "On XX/XX/XXXX suspended new
article creation
until XX/
XX/XXXX in order to better work on existing articles.
If this is
an
important topic that has developed since we made this
decision,
you
can probably find information on it by looking at
existing
articles
on related topics."
We've suggested doing it for a day here and there. The heck with
that. Let's do it for a long period of time so that the culture
of
fixing what we have becomes entrenched.
Or, I mean, we could decide that everything we've worked on this
far
is actually crap and create drastic proposals for how
we could
start
over.
-Phil
This is not a good idea. Haven't we learned anything from locking
down *anonymous* page creation, and from the constant, and
people-pissing-off, mess that is Articles for Creation? It's not a
success by any standards - it's led to burnt out editors, deeply
frustrated and well-meaning outsiders, and an arcane submission
process that is slow, glitchy, and doesn't scale! There is no
evidence whatsoever that AfC has helped Wikipedia: no evidence
that it has encouraged people to focus on articles.
And now you want to disable page creation for everyone except
admins? Besides the obvious aspect of adding yet another thing
only admins and other higher ups can do, with ramifications for
the culture and legally (if this goes through, and admins have to
manually approve each article, will Wikipedia pass from being a
host capable of claiming DMCA safe harbor to a publisher
exercising editorial control and discretion over posting of new
articles?), this simply won't scale. There are only what, 1100
admins, and how many of them are active? 900? Admins are already
kind of busy with deletions and page moves and other sort of
processes which are already too often backlogged (and related
stuff like OTRS). We should be very very reluctant to propose any
new process which could dump literally thousands of entries a day
onto their collective laps.
--
Gwern
Inquiring minds want to know.