Although you're right that we don't want to "forbid" or "disallow" legitimate editing, I don't think we want to discourage it either. Your suggestion makes it harder for well-meaning newbies to find out how to edit or create articles. A better way would be to encourage more healing. We already have the "stub" message which encourages newbies to expand a stub they encounter. One idea I was toying with in my mind recently is this. When sysops delete an article, the article goes back to saying "Wikipedia does not have an article with this title yet." Maybe we should actually let everyone (including anonymous users) know that there used to be an article, and (this is the important part) show the reason for its deletion. If a newbie goes back to see what happened to their article, and they see it gone, they are more likely to just put it back in (it looks to them more like a glitch in the system or an accident than a deliberate deleting). If it actually said "This article was deleted for the following reason: vandalism", they are more likely to ackowledge that putting their article back in is going to have the same effect again. Timwi _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l .

That wouldn't work with the way things are currently deleted as sysops usually don't type a reason when deleting speedy deletion candidates. They leave the full text of the article as the deletion reason, which helps others to check what has been deleted as any user can read this text in the deletion log. As an alternative, I've added the following to [[MediaWiki:Noarticletext]]: * If you created an article under this title previously, it may have been deleted. See [[Wikipedia:Candidates for speedy deletion#The cases|candidates for speedy deletion]] for possible reasons. Perhaps this will help explain to newcomers where their article went. Angela. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l .

Looking at the issue, it would seem that making it a bit more difficult for anons to create new pages (or at least sub-200 byte pages) would solve a large part of the problem.

Anons will still be able to edit and at this point *improving* the articles we already have should be encouraged over creating more tiny articles.

With well over 300,000 articles, the English Wikipedia no longer needs to do concentrate on that so much. We already have too many seeds for the amount of fertilizer and water on hand.