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

[Gwern Branwen]

Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> writes:

> Many of the proposals to "fix" Wikipedia of late have seemed to 
  take  
> as a premise that what we've done is wrong. I, personally, 
  disagree.  
> I think we've got a pretty good encyclopedia. It needs work, but 
  it's  
> good enough to go public with, which, thank God, since we went 
  public  
> with it. Sensible users can use it well.
>
> But if we really do want to speed up its improvement (which I 
  can  
> take or leave, but everyone else seems desperate to take it)...
>
> 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.
>
> Anything that's absolutely vital that comes into being in those  
> months will still be possible to write about in a few months, so  
> there's no real rush. And a lot of the crap that we create by 
  reflex  
> will not get created and be pleasantly forgotten about. (Brian  
> Peppers, anyone?) And we could easily make the red page text 
  read  
> something like "On XX/XX/XXXX suspended new article creation 
  until XX/ 
> XX/XXXX in order to better work on existing articles. If this is 
  an  
> important topic that has developed since we made this decision, 
  you  
> can probably find information on it by looking at existing 
  articles  
> on related topics."
>
> We've suggested doing it for a day here and there. The heck with  
> that. Let's do it for a long period of time so that the culture 
  of  
> fixing what we have becomes entrenched.
>
> Or, I mean, we could decide that everything we've worked on this 
  far  
> is actually crap and create drastic proposals for how we could 
  start  
> over.
>
> -Phil

This is not a good idea. Haven't we learned anything from locking 
down *anonymous* page creation, and from the constant, and 
people-pissing-off, mess that is Articles for Creation? It's not a 
success by any standards - it's led to burnt out editors, deeply 
frustrated and well-meaning outsiders, and an arcane submission 
process that is slow, glitchy, and doesn't scale! There is no 
evidence whatsoever that AfC has helped Wikipedia: no evidence 
that it has encouraged people to focus on articles.

And now you want to disable page creation for everyone except 
admins?  Besides the obvious aspect of adding yet another thing 
only admins and other higher ups can do, with ramifications for 
the culture and legally (if this goes through, and admins have to 
manually approve each article, will Wikipedia pass from being a 
host capable of claiming DMCA safe harbor to a publisher 
exercising editorial control and discretion over posting of new 
articles?), this simply won't scale. There are only  what, 1100 
admins, and how many of them are active? 900? Admins are already 
kind of busy with deletions and page moves and other sort of 
processes which are already too often backlogged (and related 
stuff like OTRS). We should be very very reluctant to propose any 
new process which could dump literally thousands of entries a day 
onto their collective laps.

-- 
Gwern
Inquiring minds want to know.