On 4/1/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/03/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
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.
<snip/>
Personally, I wouldn't have a problem with this. It's a lot easier to fix the 1,5 million articles we have if there's not constantly new stuff pouring in. But people will turn to Wikipedia if there's a new hurricane or massive flood or to read about a country's new prime minister or president.
These are the type of articles that need to be created and kept up-to-date as they happen for maximal effect. If we were to do this for a significant amount of time, we'd be severely lacking in articles about current events. How do you think we should handle that?
Oh, we can invent a process. Give the "article creation right" flag to admins or bureaucrats or [some arbitrary respected group of people], have a process where new articles can be created in a short period if it's utterly essential, leave them to it with the understanding it really shouldn't be used much.
It's certainly nothing we can't solve just by fiddling the rules a little bit, and as we ourselves *make* the rules...
Locking down new article creation while we do a cleanup is sensible; Afd would be less like a sewerage drain and we could then judge the status of the cleanup by the, hopefully diminishing, number of Afds being raised. This suggestion meshes very well with the other current activities like V 1.0 and stable revisions.
During this time, creation of new articles could be restricted to admins, and non-admins could use WP:AFC. It would be more tedious, but it would further encourage a culture of writing articles that fit within our policies and guidelines. Regular contributors can write userspace articles and submit them to WP:AFC in order to request that they are moved into the main namespace by an admin.
-- John