[WikiEN-l] How friendly are we to Newbies? Create an article as a newbie challenge now paused

[stevertigo]

Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> WereSpielChequers could have expressed his concerns a bit better here.
> It seems that, under the guise of this project, some people are
> intentionally writing very low quality articles and then rules-lawyering
> over the specific speedy deletion category names:
> There can be a fine line between probing the boundary of new user treatment
> and a breaching experiment.

I don't really understand the "[x]-lawyering," in that diff (in Greg's
post). (Note that "[x]-lawyering" is largely just a stigmanym given
out like candy to anyone who's actually somewhat successful at arguing
against mob rule).

But, since you mention it, is "intentionally [creating] very low
quality articles" really a serious problem on Wikipedia in the first
place? Edits like these (
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Big_Lebowski&oldid=286557
) are what built Wikipedia, and yet the deletionista says these need
immediate deletion to "purify" and "protect" WP from "POV" and "OR."
(In that case at lease, capable people decided to employ Wikipedia's
article editing functionality, and {{sofixit}}ed it instead).

The issue is really that deletion is reserved for two things: 1)
Articles created with no purpose (ie. titles that do not correspond to
anything encyclopedically conceptual), and 2) articles created as
vandalism. My thinking is that lots of [[red links]] are in fact a
good thing for WP. Maybe making red links a different color (green?)
might counter our tendency to undo new links and thus foster article
creation? The issue there is teaching newbies how to find the existing
article and redirecting to it.

-Stevertigo
"Some people say a man is made outta mud..