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

[MacGyverMagic/Mgm]

On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>
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 Personally, I wouldn't have a problem with this. It's a lot easier to fix
the 1,5 million articles we have if there's not constantly new stuff pouring
in. But people will turn to Wikipedia if there's a new hurricane or massive
flood or to read about a country's new prime minister or president.

These are the type of articles that need to be created and kept up-to-date
as they happen for maximal effect. If we were to do this for a significant
amount of time, we'd be severely lacking in articles about current events.
How do you think we should handle that?