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

[David Moran]

Personally, I am a Wikipedian who prefers the creation of new articles to
the maintenance of old ones. I'd guess I've created several hundred. It's
not that I don't see the value in improving existing articles, I simply find
it more rewarding to make new ones. And efficient - being a person who reads
encyclopedias recreationally, I'm often starting from a point of "Here's an
interesting thing, and I've already got sources and a researchable
bibliography right in front of me." It's just what floats my wiki-boat.

That being said, I think explicit drives and events that encourage
non-creation and article cleanup are great ideas.  How is the community at
large to know about our backlog if we don't try to communicate it to them?

FMF

On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 7:38 AM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net> wrote:

> > 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
>
>
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