The Autoconfirmed article creation trial (also known as "ACTRIAL") has been running on English Wikipedia for the last six months, starting in mid September 2017. During the trial, article creation was limited to users with autoconfirmed status, meaning they had made at least ten edits and the account was at least four days old. Non-autoconfirmed users who tried to create a new page were redirected to a landing page, which encouraged them to create the page in the Draft namespace.
There's been a long-standing desire in the English Wikipedia community to run ACTRIAL since 2011, and last year, the Wikimedia Foundation Community Tech team worked on fulfilling this request.
The Community Tech team worked in partnership with community members from English Wikipedia to set up ACTRIAL as a research project, measuring the impact of the trial on three key areas: new editor activity and retention, the quality control processes (particularly New Page Patrol and Articles for Creation), and content quality.
Researcher Morten Warncke-Wang designed the study, collected and analysed data, and has just published the ACTRIAL Post-trial Research Report on English Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed_ article_creation_trial/Post-trial_Research_Report
The report presents the key findings, and makes suggestions for both the Enwiki community and the Wikimedia Foundation to consider. We hope that this report is a productive contribution to the ongoing discussions about new users and quality control.
We're looking forward to seeing what people think about the findings, and having lots more conversations about these issues. Please feel free to comment on the report's talk page, or ping us in the on-wiki conversations, wherever they emerge. :) Thanks!