[WikiEN-l] Blocking anon page creation was an experiment, wasn't it?

[The Cunctator]

On 8/22/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>
> >New articles are still important, as you've pointed out... But I've
> >seen no evidence that new article creation belongs even on the top 100
> >task list for making our encyclopedia not suck.
> >
> >
> I'd certainly put it in the top 100, even the top 10, although probably
> not the top 3.  When a user looks up an article, the worst possible
> result would be to find a misleading or otherwise incorrect article.

Why's that so bad? They can just edit it to fix it.

> The second-worst result would be to find no article.

Why's that so bad? They can just create it.

Oh wait, they can't. So that IS bad.

> The third-worst
> would be to find a somewhat shoddy but not misleading or wrong article.

Again, fixable. I'd think the obviously wrong article might be more
likely to motivate someone to fix it so maybe shoddy is a bad thing.

> So I'd rank "we don't cover that at all" pretty high on the list of ways
> our coverage of a topic could suck.
>
> I know I'm still frequently annoyed that I have to look elsewhere for
> information in seemingly basic subjects because we don't yet cover
> them.  For example, there are 20+ former prime ministers of Greece on
> which we have no article, and thousands of basic computer science topics.