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

[Carcharoth]

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 5:13 PM, stevertigo <stvrtg at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 4:50 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> or do you claim that we shouldn't
>>> delete sub-stubs duplicating pre-existing articles?
> Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> If the title is valid, it is easier to turn it into a redirect and
>> merge any content not already mentioned in the existing article (a
>> s-merge as it is sometimes called). The failure to consider moving
>> content elsewhere (and leaving a redirect to preserve the
>> contributions history) is a common misunderstanding made by those who
>> request deletion in such cases.
>
> +!
>
> Well, that's the point. If our sanitation engineers actually did what
> real sanitation engineers do and actually salvaged things (nice coffee
> table!), nobody would have a problem with deletion as a process.
>
> And as for the philosophical aspects, we don't generally let nihilists
> have too much control for the simple reason that they tend to turn
> destruction into an -ism.

To be fair. When actually trying to do this at NPP, practice is harder
than theory. I have every sympathy and respect for those doing NPP, as
they will make mistakes. I would err on the side of caution and leave
such articles to be dealt with later, but then PROD and AfD also get
applied without much cleanup effort applied, so that doesn't seem to
help either. Often, the only real solution is to apply {{sofixit}}.
Which, ironically, is sort of what I think this whole project
(WP:NEWT) was doing. Making an attempt to gather data to get a fix to
a perceived problem. There have been some good suggestions for other
ways to gather the data. Me, I'd personally be interested in looking
at articles that got deleted at seeing whether any can be rewritten
and (in some cases) the history undeleted. Take a random sample of
deleted articles and see what proportion actually didn't fix the
criteria and what proportion can be written as acceptable articles.

Carcharoth