On Nov 7, 2007, at 8:30 PM, Delirium wrote:
Well, as simply a descriptive statement about how the encyclopedia
works, a new article that has *no* sources stands a good chance of being deleted---and we warn contributors of this up front on the edit page. Basically the "standard" way of creating a new article is to write at least a decent stub with at least one reliable source, and helping new users to understand that will reduce the amount of angst from people unexpectedly getting their articles deleted.
One thing we should look at once new article creation by anons and new accounts gets re-activated is how many days, on average, it takes a new user to create a new article. This gives a useful sense of how much we need to weight our advice one way or the other.
Of course, I also tend to think that deletion is not the first choice for a new unsourced article - one should ask the creator for a source first.
-Phil