Rory Stolzenberg wrote:
You're right, Wikipedia certainly isn't
comprehensive. However, this is only
a temporary solution, and as soon as it's over, people can start adding more
articles again (indeed, we'd probably even have a system for people to do
this during the moratorium). This doesn't make it worse for newbies, because
by closing new article creation now, we can finally clear the massive
cleanup backlogs, and so we can start dealing with new articles right away,
making Wikipedia more reliable, giving it a better reputation and therefore
attracting more new users.
Now that most backlogs are categorized by date it should be possible to
get some rough information about how quickly things in them get
addressed. Personally, I suspect that three months wouldn't be long
enough to flush all our backlogs. Especially considering that disabling
article creation isn't going to stop things from continuing to be added
to them. I find old articles in need of cleanup, merging, fact-checking,
etc all the time in my travels.
In addition, perhaps if we didn't have to focus
on fixing year-old problems, we could open up article creation to everyone,
including anons, making us even more welcoming to new users than before, but
still not compromising our integrity, because we'd have the manpower to
actually fix any new articles with problems.
The reason anon article creation is disabled is not because anons were
creating articles with problems, it's because an anon user added a false
statement to an article that had been created by a logged-in editor. No
evidence was ever presented (that I'm aware of) suggesting that
anon-created articles are more of a problem than non-anon-created ones.