Being a linguist i am often asked how many languages do i speak. I don't like that question, because that's not exactly what Linguistics is about.
Being a Wikipedian i am often asked how many articles did i write. I don't like that question either, because most work on Wikipedia is about improving existing articles, not about creating new ones.
On the discussion about the "Proposal to require autoconfirmed status in order to create articles" in the English Wikipedia some people commented that creating articles is not so important anyway, that the growing amount of articles makes it harder to maintain them and that there should be more effort to explain people that they should join Wikipedia to improve the existing articles and now just to create new ones.
This is not a strong argument to support this anti-wiki proposal to further restrict article creation in en.wp, but it is true by itself. There have been attempts to tackle it: SJ's lightning talk about The Best Page On Wikipedia (WP:BACKLOG) in the NYC meetup last August and advertising WP:BACKLOG in the en.wp watchlist are examples of that. The Hebrew Wikipedia conducts "no new articles" days every now and then, where the editors are encouraged - not enforced - to improve existing articles rather than create new ones; unfortunately, i have no data about how well it works.
I would be happy to hear about such efforts in other projects.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com "We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore