[WikiEN-l] Lock new article creation for three months

[Dycedarg]

On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Why don't we lock new article creation in the main namespace entirely
> for three months? Or six months? Demand that people fix existing
> articles.
>

I have a question concerning this: Is it possible in the software to lock
down only article creation in the mainspace and nowhere else? After all,
IP's can't create pages, and they can't create any normal (as opposed to
talk) pages at all. If this wasn't the case, you'd either have to get the
developers to program something, or deal with the hundreds of angry people
who are used to randomly making new subpages in their userspace all the
time, the new users who wouldn't have user pages at all, and project pages
requiring new archives. I see nothing in any of the MediaWiki documentation
about being able to restrict page creation by namespace, except for a
distinction between normal pages and talk pages.

If this was technically possible or made possible, I'd definitely be in full
support of it. It is completely and utterly impossible to increase the ratio
of good articles to bad articles at the current exponential rate of article
creation. The percentage of articles that qualify as good articles is
dropping; from what I understand fairly rapidly too. Sure, creating crappy
articles is more fun than fixing crappy articles, but which is better for
the encyclopedia in the long run?

-- 

Dycedarg