[WikiEN-l] Re: Requested articles

[Daniel P. B. Smith]

> If only people spent more time reducing the backlog on requested
> articles. Those wouldn't be half as controversial as roads and schools
> and help to improve the coverage of Wikipedia. It's not as if they're
> writing what they know about anyway, or those road articles would be
> near FA instead of stubs.

Instead of fussing about improving the AfD process, I'd like to give  
some thought to improving the article _request_ process. Right now  
it's actually quite difficult, as you're expected to thread your way  
through a deeply nested Roget's-Thesaurus-like logical organization  
of the sum of human knowledge to find the place to insert a request.

I'd like _requesting_ an article to be truly as easy as _creating_  
one. That is, I'd a link or button which automatically adds your  
request to some list somewhere... and lets other people sort 'em out  
into categories.

I honestly feel that many problem substubs--the ones which give  
virtually no information that is not in their titles--should be  
treated either in one of two ways. Many substubs look to me like good- 
faith efforts to point out a topic that someone would like covered-- 
but does not have the time or the skills to make a usable start on.  
If a stub is not a usable launching pad for an article, then it does  
not serve any function other than pointing out the absence of an  
article on a worthy topic. It is, then, not an article, not a stub,  
not the start of an article--it is an article request made in an  
inappropriate way.

I think the appropriate disposition of such main-namespace-pages is  
to delete them from the main namespace and re-enter them as article  
requests.

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
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