[Foundation-l] "How many articles have you created?"

[Amir E. Aharoni]

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