On 12/9/05, Daniel P. B. Smith wikipedia2006@dpbsmith.com wrote:
How about this for an experiment: turn off article creation _and_ deletion for a while? Freeze the table of contents (not that we have one)...
So that all anyone could possibly do is to edit existing articles?
It would force everyone to pay attention to the articles that exist already, and with 857,833 of them you'd think people could find something worth their attention.
With deletion being impossible, AfD would become unnecessary... as would DRV. So, that should make one faction happy. On the other hand, there would be no opportunity to add subtrivial topics. (Or trivial topics, or significant topics). That should make another faction happy.
I wouldn't call it an experiment, because it's obvious that it's not a long term solution.
I don't think it'd be horrible, if it were kept to no more than one week a month. Even then, you can't turn off deletion completely. Copyright infringements still have to be deleted. Patent nonsense probably should be deleted too (though one could argue for just editing). Test pages, pure vandalism, history merging, and non-controversial page move deletion should be kept on too. Not quite all the speedy criteria, but the truly obvious ones, at least.
I dunno, might be interesting to try.
Anthony