[WikiEN-l] Potential Wikipedian growing pains

Oddly enough, I wonder about the exact opposite. I fear that people enjoy creating new articles far more than they enjoy editing existing articles, and that people look desperately for topics that do not exist yet so that they can be the first to create them. The Wikipedian equivalent of the Slashdot FIRST POST!!!! This means that over time a greater proportion of newly created articles will reflect an artificial attempt to find a topic that hasn't been "taken," and a smaller proportion will be reflect a genuine attempt to serve potential readers. I do not think its growth will stop. The problem is, will the quality of the articles hold up? There's no obvious reason why it shouldn't, and no obvious reason why it should. One reason why it _might_ not hold up is that when Wikipedia was less famous, contributing to it required a greater interest in the project and a greater commitment to the project's ideals. As it becomes more and more familiar, it is possible that we will see an increasing proportion of new "articles" that are really paragraph-long newbie tests. To tell the truth, I think many of the "articles" that land on AfD are best not regarded as articles at all, but as elaborate newbie tests OR as badly executed article requests. I'm thinking of substubs that convey no information at all except the fact that someone either a) genuinely wanted an article on that topic, or b) simply wanted to experience the pleasure of creating an article. I've been casting "votes" recently in AfD that say "delete, and enter a request for the article." So far, nobody but me seems to think this is a good idea. -- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith(a)verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/