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

[Kelly Martin]

On 3/31/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
>  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?

Admins can still create new articles as needed.

I called for a one-month moratorium on new articles in my blog
recently (<http://nonbovine-ruminations.blogspot.com/2007/03/notability-maintainability-and-quality.html>).
 I found Kurt's comment there interesting: the German Wikipedia is
apparently discussing a proposal to disable new article creation one
week out of each month; this proposal is not faring well.

I suppose it is more fun to create than it is to maintain.  Open
source software has the same problem -- which is why there are
hundreds of half-written IRC clients out there.  The only way we got
GIMP to 1.0 was to declare a "feature freeze" and to spend a couple of
months doing nothing but killing bugs.  Wikipedia needs to do
essentially the same thing: stop adding new stuff until they get the
old stuff organized, at least a bit more.  Until they do, the bleeding
will not stop.

Kelly