On 31/03/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote: I'm not completely convinced, but don't forget images, if by some miracle this gets adopted. :) Judson [[:en:User:Cohesion]]

On 4/1/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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

On 3/31/07, Anthony <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote: I think this would be a mistake. With the greater focus on already existing articles, it will actually increase the chance that people will find articles that should be deleted but have never really had enough attention payed to them to discover that. -- Dycedarg

On 4/1/07, Anthony <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote: We have enough crap already to keep Afd going for quite a while. My preference is too keep Afd running because I'm concerned that in its absence a lot of articles will be deleted using CSD. Even when justified, a prod type approach to deletion only notifies the existing editors. If the contributors who care are not regulars, the article will slip down the drain. WP:AFD has a sharp edge and related WikiProject mechanisms such as delsorting are an effective way to involve contributors that would not otherwise have been aware the article existed. It is that type of article that a cleanup effort needs to cater for. I don't see the point of creating another suitable system of doing what AFD is intended to do: gathering consensus for deletion. Turning off the firehose will make AFD a happy place where we can take our time and focus on researching odd articles, cleaning up unsourced statements, and removing the articles that have no place on Wikipedia. In the event of a lock down, AFC could be restricted to a community defined criteria for new articles that are considered necessary during this period, e.g. current events. The rest can be rejected out of hand by ordinary editors before an admin needs to see it. AFC would see more traffic, but it would be a pragmatic way to turn the hose down to a well defined trickle that can be adjusted as required to deal with new situations as they arise. -- John

On 3/31/07, Gwern Branwen <gwern0(a)gmail.com> wrote: I agree. Volunteer effort is not transformable in that way. There is absolutely no proof WHATSOEVER that shutting down article creation will help our project at all. It's yet another manifestation of the belief that if you stop people doing what they want, they'll instead go off and do what YOU want. This doesn't happen. If people can't do what they want, in a project MOSTLY CREATED BY OCCASIONAL CONTRIBUTORS, they'll simply leave. The only people steerable in such a way are regular contributors. We do need to find ways to encourage those deeply committed to the project to waste less time dealing with crap that doesn't matter. Encourage, not force. -Matt

On 3/31/07, Gwern Branwen <gwern0(a)gmail.com> wrote: This is pretty much a complete misinterpretation of the proposal. Let me outline it for you: A. This would be a very temporary change. This would last for a few months in an attempt to rejuvenate clean-up efforts, and then go away forever. B. This would not be an attempt to filter all new pages through the admins using some uber-beefed up AfC. There would be no new articles whatsoever. Zero. Zip. Nada. The only very few and far between exceptions would be those necessary to maintain our coverage of recent events, such as hurricanes, floods, wars, and other natural/not so natural disasters. Admins would only make new pages if it was patently obvious that we need such an article immediately. Any request for an article that is not necessary for such coverage would be ignored and deleted on sight. I would agree that the overall number of edits would drop as people who typically only create new pages took a wikibreak. But I believe that enough would remain that the concentration of their efforts on the remaining articles could be of a large amount of benefit. In fact: Even if the amount of edits improving current articles remained constant, and no work was redirected at all, the fact that all the work that usually goes into stubbifying, prodding, CSDing, AfDing, wikifying, and all the rest of what is necessary to make the brand new articles serviceable could now instead be devoted to making the rest of the encyclopedia better, means that in my opinion the over-all result would be positive. If anyone simply can't wait another second before starting work on a new article, than they can make it in their userspace and work on it until they can put it in mainspace again. The draft will no doubt be all the better for it anyway. -- Dycedarg

On 3/31/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote: I'm concerned it will be done simply because people want to try SOMETHING, without really thinking through the actual effects and without doing any real testing to make sure it helps. Meanwhile, every time I think that some content would work better in a new article I can't do it. Every time someone finds a crucial hole in our coverage they won't be able to add it. Many of those people won't come back. I have a great deal of caution about the urge to 'do something'. Things done just to 'do something' tend to be poorly thought out and lacking in results and lacking in research to see if they actually did any good. -Matt

On 4/1/07, Anthony <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote: I raised the point that during the time article creation is shut down, new topics (often current events) will arise that require articles. To not be 3 months behind after creation gets turned on again, we need some effort to keep up to date and to have admins do it is the most sensible choice. Mgm

Anon page creation was shut down with no specific re-enable date mentioned. That's quite different from this proposal. Mgm On 4/1/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote:

Erik Moeller wrote: 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

On 4/1/07, Rich Holton <richholton(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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

MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote: Adding new limits to everyone except admins is IMO no different in practical terms from giving admins more powers.

On 01/04/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote: I would answer: don't bother, because it will be such an utter clusterfuck and PR disaster (relevant since it's basically a PR-driven initiative) that the fine details really don't matter. - d.

MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote: I can't think of another way offhand. What I'm saying is that if we go ahead with this, this is how I think it'll be perceived. So, I guess I'm coming down pretty firmly now in the "this is not a good idea" camp.

On 4/1/07, William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com> wrote: I disagree entirely, it could quite easily be spun positively. "Wikipedia changes focus to fixing errors." That's already what Jimbo's been saying, so it's not much of a change. Yes, perhaps we'd lose some people, but what about the thousands of people who've heard about how unreliable Wikipedia is because of all the news stories about how we fucked up somewhere? We need a better reputation, and the only way to get that is to fix our problems. No, we might not get a shift of contributions from new article creation to cleaning up, and many of those people might stop contributing altogether until the lock is lifted, but it still gives the cleaning crews time to catch up. Right now, thousands upon thousands of articles need fixing, and that grows every day. If we can get that down to a reasonable level, we might be able to keep up with the new articles later, instead of sticking them in a category for a year before they're first looked at.

Yes, it's a work in progress, but to actually be "in progress" you need to make progress and articles being stuck in a category for more than a year or even 2 isn't progress. On 4/2/07, Matthew Brown <morven(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 4/2/07, The Cunctator <cunctator(a)gmail.com> wrote: Heh. I think some don't realise (because they don't work in the right areas) just how incomplete Wikipedia is in many topic areas, and thus how damaging shutting down article creation would be. In their view, Wikipedia already contains pretty much all the articles it needs and thus article creation is something only harmful (because all new articles are unencyclopedic cruft anyway). -Matt

On 4/2/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: If I was stopped from creating new articles, I probably wouldn't be that pissed off (okay, who am I kidding, I would) but no matter what I'd stop creating new articles. If you don't get it, my point is that would be A Bad Thing. How many redlinks are there in Wikipedia? Hmmmmmmmm?

These seem like good ideas for someone to try on a fork of Wikipedia. Kind of like John Galt leading the few good Objectivists into the mountains to get away from the dreck of common human civilization. I'm not even being sarcastic; I think forks off of Wikipedia trying radically different models for content creation and management are healthy. On 4/4/07, Anthony <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote: