[WikiEN-l] Proposal: Soft deletion

[wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com]

On 2/28/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think we should work more on pointing people to relevant rules before they
> post their first article.

That's exactly what I had in mind when I created

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Your_first_article&oldid=3952885

in June of 2004. The intention was to produce a _single_ article that would warn people off the most common mistakes before posting their first article, instead of hoping they would find their way through a thicket of multiple policy and advice pages. 

For a long time it was very conspicuously linked in the article-creation template (the text that appears above the edit box when you create an article). That text still links to it, and judging from the amount of vandalism it gets people must still be looking at it, but its now buried in a thicket of multiple policy and advice pages.

I have no idea whether WP:YFA has any useful effect. (I know it was way too long when I wrote it, and it hasn't gotten any shorter!)