Tim Starling wrote:
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 would say that whether or not the experiment beginning today on preventing anons from creating *any* articles works, we might try this one as well (after a couple of weeks, say) as a "softer" solution.
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.
Yes.
--Jimbo