geni wrote:
On 12/1/05, Alex Schenck linuxbeak@gmail.com wrote:
Now, with that said, I need feedback. Please provide.
--Linuxbeak
Well as a deltionist admin even I feel you are going a little far. While I seem to recall that uncyclopedia did have a few weeks in which they cleared out at lot of rubish by allowing the admins to delete anything they felt was not up to par I don't think this would work on wikipedia.
My personal answer is that we should make it harder to create new articles in the first place. Probably by restricting the creating of orphans. Don't ask me how to do that though.
We can tell fairly easily whether a page will be an orphan before it is created, it's an indexed query. So we could, say, prevent creation of orphans by anons. I'm not sure what the effect would be. I can tell you that currently, 205 of the 1498 articles in [[Category:Articles that need to be wikified]] are orphans, I don't know how many were orphans when they were created.
I guess this would prohibit the creation of articles that are created casually, a few sentences about something the author cares about. But I think the effect would be smaller for larger junk -- text copied from homework essays or personal webpages for example. The contributors are probably more motivated in that case.
-- Tim Starling