[WikiEN-l] on new article creation

[Anthony]

On 8/28/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/28/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> > I try to assume good faith, but the long lack of information about this
> > started to make me strongly suspicious that no experiment was intended,
> > Jimbo wasn't interested in the actual impact on editing and just wanted
> > to make an appearance of "doing something" so press releases could be
> > issued to counter the bad PR of the Siegenthaler matter. While
> > countering bad PR is certainly a good and worthy goal, I would rather
> > not have random tempests-in-teapots spawn restrictions on Wikipedia
> > editing with no plan or options for ever repealing them if they turn out
> > to be counterproductive.
>
> Well, Jimbo could be evil. Alternatively, he thought "here's an idea
> for how to fix the problems we've been having, let's see how it goes".
> 6 months or whatever later, it seems to have been going fairly well,
> and the only outcry is over the lack of formal experimentation, rather
> than the result itself.

Back in June Jimbo posted this:

On 6/20/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
> > On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 17:37:21 -0400, "The Cunctator"
> > <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Sorry. This is mainly a reference to the whole "Today, as an experiment, we
> >> will be turning off new pages creation for anonymous users in the English
> >> Wikipedia." I still think you were being a bit disingenuous (if
> >> unintentially) about the experimentality of that decision.
> >
> > It worked, though.
>
> It is not clear to me that it did.  I would love for us to have some
> serious analysis of that.

I don't think anyone is claiming that Jimbo is evil.  But to call this
an "experiment" is terribly inaccurate considering that months later
the main proponent doesn't have any clue whether or not it worked and
is asking for others to do the analysis.

Assume good faith.  In other words, assume incompetence.  In any case,
I'd say it's time to correct the mistake.  Gregory says "that we
shouldn't act without evidence when evidence is so easy to obtain".
To that I'd respond that the "experiment" was conducted so poorly that
good evidence is impossible to obtain.  There are far too many other
changes that have been made between the start of the "experiment" and
today.

Anthony