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

[Dycedarg]

On 3/31/07, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

This is pretty much a complete misinterpretation of the proposal.
Let me outline it for you:
A. This would be a very temporary change. This would last for a few months
in an attempt to rejuvenate clean-up efforts, and then go away forever.
B. This would not be an attempt to filter all new pages through the admins
using some uber-beefed up AfC. There would be no new articles whatsoever.
Zero. Zip. Nada. The only very few and far between exceptions would be those
necessary to maintain our coverage of recent events, such as hurricanes,
floods, wars, and other natural/not so natural disasters. Admins would only
make new pages if it was patently obvious that we need such an article
immediately. Any request for an article that is not necessary for such
coverage would be ignored and deleted on sight.

I would agree that the overall number of edits would drop as people who
typically only create new pages took a wikibreak. But I believe that enough
would remain that the concentration of their efforts on the remaining
articles could be of a large amount of benefit. In fact: Even if the amount
of edits improving current articles remained constant, and no work was
redirected at all, the fact that all the work that usually goes into
stubbifying, prodding, CSDing, AfDing, wikifying, and all the rest of what
is necessary to make the brand new articles serviceable could now instead be
devoted to making the rest of the encyclopedia better, means that in my
opinion the over-all result would be positive. If anyone simply can't wait
another second before starting work on a new article, than they can make it
in their userspace and work on it until they can put it in mainspace again.
The draft will no doubt be all the better for it anyway.


-- 

Dycedarg