On 3/31/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill(a)gmail.com> wrote:
To be honest, I don't think article creation is
stealing much effort
into other areas. Most users almost always edit existing articles. So
if we can't expect efforts to be redirected, this won't help us much
at all.
A new article doesn't just take up the time of the person who created
it. It also takes up the time of everyone who reads the new article
looking for problems, who edits the new article, who categorizes the
new article, who nominates the new article for deletion, who discusses
the deletion, etc.
At about 2500 new articles in a day (and that's the ones that
survive), that's a lot of redirected effort. Wikipedia has 1.7
million articles. 2500*3 months*30 days/1.7 million=13%, for an idea
of how useful that redirected effort could be, *if* there were some
way to use it effectively.
One possibility for increasing the effectiveness of the redirection
could be to redirect Special:newpages to a list of 2500 random
articles selected each day (perhaps even more effectively, 100
articles selected each hour). [[Wikipedia:New pages patrol]] could
likewise be temporarily redirected.
I dunno, it might help. I don't really like the idea, but 3 months
isn't that long.
Anthony