On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
But instead of increased patrolling and speedy deletions, this could be implemented in the Mediawiki software. If a user (logged in or IP address) tries to create a new page, their recent contribution history could be checked, and if any of their five most recently created articles (except redirects) are shorter than, say, 300 bytes, they would simply be unable to create another article. This would be a very soft kind of blocking (as soon as you have improved your existing article, you can start the next one), each case being completely an affair between the user and the software, not involving opinions of individual admins.
Sounds like a bad idea. If the community doesn't want these stubs, the better way to act would be to create an easy method to get these pages deleted. A system such as you propose would punish people who make short pages for perfectly good reasons (like disambiguation pages), and would likely be subverted using lengthenings that make the article worse rather than better (like subst-ing rather than including complicated templates).