[WikiEN-l] A microthreshold for article _creation?_

[Stan Shebs]

dpbsmith at verizon.net wrote:

>The Wikipedia promise is "edit this page." 
>
>But I don't think the promise of zero-threshold _editing_ should 
>automatically be a promise of zero-threshold article _creation._
>
>_Most_ people get their feet wet with simple edits, giving a chance to get 
>acculturated before taking the leap to creating an article. People whose 
>first edit is the creation of an article are, I think, showing _too_ bold a 
>temperament.
>
A side-effect of making hoops for creation while leaving addition
wide open is that you incentivize new people to glue their material
into existing articles even if that doesn't make much sense. So
you'll have bios tacked onto the existing town articles (birthplaces),
chemist bios including the full info on the compounds they studied,
and so forth. Even in the cases where merging might make sense, the
new editor won't be able to create the necessary redirs either, so
the uncreated articles continue to be redlinks and offer no hint
that the content already exists in some other article (or maybe even
replicated in several articles).

I've gamed out a few similar schemes of my own, and in general it
works out that there's little advantage to making substantive
distinctions between creation and modification.

Stan