If this was to be implemented it would be for a limited amount of time and applied for creation of a specific set of articles. It is not to give admins more powers, it is to focus the attention of editors on fixing existing articles instead of creating new articles. It is easier to fix what we have if there isn't a constant influx of new material that doesn't get the eyes it needs.
Mgm
On 4/1/07, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@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.
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