[WikiEN-l] declining numbers of active EN wiki admins

[Martijn Hoekstra]

<snip>
I'll add that it doesn't take much to simply create an account and
create an article that says "I luv Jane Doe she iz so awsumtastic!!"
While banning anonymous creation in the mainspace had its good
intentions, it's probably not as useful now as it was intended.
</snip>

And I'd like to add to that, that dealing with these pages is quite a
lot of work. Speedy the page is quickly done. You then have to explain
to the user that the article isn't appropriate, but that he's welcome
to continue making contributions, and guide him the way. Templates
just don't work for that, cause they always feel templated. In 4/5
cases the user will want to know what he must do in order to do make
an article on Jane Doe. That takes quite some time to explain, and you
will have to explain that chances are Wikipedia will never have a page
on poor jane, no matter how well she takes care of the elderly, it's
just not WP:N material, but they are more than welcome to prove you
wrong (no, sorry, the mention "the hardworking and kind volunteers at
the retirement home" isn't enough to WP:V she's hard working. Or kind.
Nor does it amount to significant coverage). All in all, I estimate
that dealing with such pages takes about 10 times as much work as it
is to create them.

It's worth it though, even if you retain only 1% of good editors. That
1% incidently is vastly more valuable than the amount of initial
articles you gain by making it easy to create new articles.

On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 8:31 PM, MuZemike <muzemike at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'll add that it doesn't take much to simply create an account and
> create an article that says "I luv Jane Doe she iz so awsumtastic!!"
> While banning anonymous creation in the mainspace had its good
> intentions, it's probably not as useful now as it was intended.
>
> For instance, just today I speedy deleted a whole group of articles
> about some classmates in a primary school somewhere in the UK. If anons
> were allowed to create mainspace articles, and instead of a registered
> user creating these articles we had an IP, then not only would there be
> more transparency in who is creating them and where (as only CheckUser
> can see underlying IPs from registered accounts), but if blocks are
> needed to prevent disruption, we can make them relatively short-term
> (instead of the common practice of indefinitely blocking registered
> accounts as "vandalism-only").
>
> Of course, it can also be argued that disallowing such editing may
> indeed help in smart article creation by reducing the number of crap
> articles (I mean complete crap) that gets created. There is probably
> some tradeoff there in new page creation as far as anon creation is
> concerned.
>
> -MuZemike
>
> On 5/28/2010 11:29 AM, Alan Liefting wrote:
>>
>> AGK wrote:
>>
>>> On 28 May 2010 16:48, Alan Liefting<aliefting at ihug.co.nz>  wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> A lot of rubbish articles get created
>>>> that need to be speedied.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> That's very true. And the CAT:CSD workload is more prone to backlog
>>> than it was a couple of years ago, perhaps because RfA is not as
>>> sympathetic to the 'recentchanges patrol' editors (the kind who keep
>>> such backlogs down) of years gone by.
>>>
>>> AGK
>>>
>>>
>> Keeping editing as a *very* open model makes extra work for the active
>> editors. Since the anons cannot create new articles we are now getting
>> millions (?) of bad faith editors creating an account to make edits.
>> There are now over 12 million editors - many of them are blocked and
>> many are "drive by" vandals with only a few edits.
>>
>> Account creation or new article creation by new users needs to be changed.
>>
>>
>> Alan Liefitng
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> WikiEN-l mailing list
>> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>