On 9/29/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
It'd be quite a major move to have to close off
new articles to that
extent just because of marketers.
We shut off article creation for anons because of one media circus. If
you recall the prevent orphan creation was the alturnative I sugested
at that point. It has a lot of benifits. Afd, prod, speedy, all filled
with orphans. It also means we are more likely to get a robust index.
Articles that are orphans are not part of the community of articles.
I spent 1.5 hours this afternoon talking to a journalist. About 20
mins of that was him complaining at length that the bureaucracy is too
damned intimidating for newcomers as it is. (I proceeded to more or
less reiterate [[:en:Wikipedia:Process is important]], which I'm sure
those of you who consider me a hack'n'slash enemy of process would
find most amusing.)
Not really. It's because it is important that process and policy and
guidelines should not exist lightly. If process doesn't matter and IAR
is to be the order of the day it matters little how much we have.
I'd suggest that if we want better behaviour from newbies, we need to
make things suck less for the good ones (like this guy) - the crap
newbies will not be stoppable by any force of clue. You watch.
My proposal would effect everyone. Newbies less so because with luck
they would not even thing of doing what they are being prevented from
doing.
And remember: most text appears to be written by
newcomers and
occasional editors, not the regulars. (Numbers not firm on this one
per AaronSw, but I understand others are checking his work.)
But how much of this text is added in the form of new articles and how
much is added to existing articles.
See, that's the sort of thing we're good at.
Be open to input from
all, even if a tweaked vandal-checking bot puts it in a patrolling
admin's "#redirect [[round file]]" list.
Problem is that there isn't much else you can do. Unwikified, linking
to a site that contains the article title in the url and created by a
one off user (and not linking to myspace). But that could apply to so
many things.
--
geni