On 4/1/07, Rich Holton richholton@gmail.com wrote:
Erik Moeller wrote:
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Because things happen every day that deserve to be documented, and there are always people who want to do so. Don't force them to try to do what you want.
There are much softer solutions to get people's attention. For example:
A simple notice:
"We have 1,715,464 articles in English. Why not bring an existing one up to [[featured article status]]?"
on the new article creation page.
A contest announced through the site notice for registered users.
A "how to make Wikipedia better today" newsletter
Making an "Improvement of the month" part of the Main Page for readers, which would also raise awareness of what Wikipedia represents.
Organizing face-to-face meetups with a focus on actual research & work -- perhaps by making them focused on topics, or WikiProjects.
E-mail newsletters of the "how you can help Wikipedia today" type. Real-time collaborations with Gobby. Topic-oriented mailing lists and IRC channels.
Be creative. Locking article creation is not.
Trying to "be creative":
How about locking article creation for everyone one day a week? Or one day in 5? or 10?
Keeping up with current events becomes much less of an issue. It resembles the sort of routine that many people are familiar with (where, for example, they do not work on weekends). And it would allow for some time to "catch up".
Of course, it would not have the immediate degree of impact that locking page creation for 3 months would have--but that includes both desirable and undesirable impact.
-Rich
Even an addicted Wikipedian can simply not edit for one day of the week if they only want to create new pages. It may help administrators with cleaning backlogs, but when a lockdown isn't long enough it won't help people catch up.
Say for example we use Sunday as the off-day and let's assume for a moment that I spend 8 hours here. If I want to do some serious research to reference an article it may take anywhere from 15 minutes to half an hour. In the best of cases that would mean I can source 32 articles if I go at it for an entire day.
It would be a drop on a hot plate.
Last time I read about the stats for this, there were 55000 articles with citation needed templates alone (that's not counting entirely unsourced articles which are at least another 50000). To get rid of both, we'd need 100000/32 = 3125 Wikipedians who know where to find the relevant sources working a whole day to get rid of the existing backlog. The WikiProject for factchecking doesn't have enough members and I doubt everyone is willing to make an effort to do this for a full working day.
In the other six days in which creation wouldn't be locked down we'd have at least 2500 new pages created a day (those are the ones that survive) many of which need sources added (that is 6x2500=15000 new entries that need vetting every week) A oneday creation block simply wouldn't be enough to get rid of the backlog or even lighten it in any sort of meaningful manner with the amount of material coming in during the days where the wikipedians doing the checking are busy with other stuff.
Mgm