I was reading a thread about locking new article creation and was reminded of an idea I once had.
See, Wikipedia is huge. We have thousands of articles every day. People will create a crappy article about a Botswanian field hockey player which will probably never see the light of day once it is removed from Special:Newpages. These articles are usually not well-written, not well-sourced, need wikification, don't meet notability standards, etc.
So I propose locking article creation for a month/week/day, putting all admins on BURNINATE MODE, and encouraging the weeding out of articles.
For a week, nobody would be able to create pages. Perhaps a day. This change would admittedly be disruptive as hell, but it would only be a week/day/etc and wouldn't be a major inconvenience.
All administrators would patrol categories of unreferenced/cleanup/AfD, and root out the articles which required death.
For users, it would be a time to go through *fD and finish all the debates, create a discussion for thousands of questionably encyclopedic articles (which would otherwise not be on AfD), and generally refuel the encyclopedia.
Perhaps we could also have a Cleanup Week, where the same article lockdown would be in effect, but everyone would be encouraged to go to WP:CLEANUP and work on cleaning up articles.
Right now, there is a tremendous effort to clear away the massive backlogs. I've seen a month of backed-up categories and 2,000 pages cleaned up in a week. But we're slipping. We can't keep up with the crapflood of new articles. It's like a bad video game that side-scrolls way too fast.
If we were to simply stop the massive flood of crap, we could finally catch up on our backlogs and make [[Category:Articles needing cleanup]] completely empty, or at least take a big bite out of it.
Likewise, we could lock creation for a week and take care of unreferenced articles, wikification, and the various other things needing work.
So I propose a week of restricted article creation (or at least in the main namespace). For a burnination of unencyclopedic material.
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