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

[Fred Bauder]

> 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

Creating new articles is a matter of mood and opportunity. You must have
found a notable subject which is not included. One I just found yesterday
is "Catalyst (NGO)" (Catalyst.Org), a substantial thinktank which
researches women's employment. In that case, I can't see how we missed
it, so far. There is no point in embargoing an article that needs to be
created. But, yes, I, and others, especially new users, sometimes try to
create articles that are meaningful to us but to hardly anyone else.

Fred