[WikiEN-l] Article Landing Pages - functional prototype to test and comment on

[Steven Walling]

On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 10:51 PM, WereSpielChequers
<werespielchequers at gmail.com> wrote:
> Before we go to such a restrictive closed wiki approach I'd really like to
> understand why the WMF has made such an abrupt Uturn on openness. I'd also
> like to see an answer from the great unanswered question of the ACTRIAL
> proposal; Why do you want newbies to make their mistakes in existing and
> sometimes very widely read articles where their mistakes will be widely
> seen and permanently recorded in the edit history, as opposed  to have them
> creating new articles which relatively few of our readers will read and
> where many of the mistakes will disappear via deletion?

This experiment is nothing like what you've described.

This is not requiring anything of people other than that, before they
get to the editing form for a new article, they click through a button
with some very brief instruction written on it, and fair warning that
improper articles are deleted. That's it.

I think it's important to keep in mind that we know very little about
the article creation process from a data-driven perspective, and this
is simply a test of an alternative method for teaching new editors the
ropes before we throw them into the deep end. It doesn't actively
restrict or close off anything. The exact same user rights are
retained for everyone.

In fact, in some ways this creates more openness. For example: for the
first time it would be actively encouraging anonymous editors to
create an account and start an article after they click a redlink.
Currently, the anonymous landing page on a redlink does not even
mention that creating an account allows you start new articles!

As for bringing up where to encourage people to edit (new versus
existing): the Foundation is not interested in funneling any new
editors away from how they want to help the encyclopedia and towards
something else. We need new articles and we need to improve existing
ones, and you can become a Wikipedian by doing either.

Steven