On 3/31/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Personally, I wouldn't have a problem with this.
It's a lot easier to fix
the 1,5 million articles we have if there's not constantly new stuff pouring
in. But people will turn to Wikipedia if there's a new hurricane or massive
flood or to read about a country's new prime minister or president.
These are the type of articles that need to be created and kept up-to-date
as they happen for maximal effect. If we were to do this for a significant
amount of time, we'd be severely lacking in articles about current events.
How do you think we should handle that?
Admins can still create new articles as needed.
I called for a one-month moratorium on new articles in my blog
recently
(<http://nonbovine-ruminations.blogspot.com/2007/03/notability-maintainability-and-quality.html>).
I found Kurt's comment there interesting: the German Wikipedia is
apparently discussing a proposal to disable new article creation one
week out of each month; this proposal is not faring well.
I suppose it is more fun to create than it is to maintain. Open
source software has the same problem -- which is why there are
hundreds of half-written IRC clients out there. The only way we got
GIMP to 1.0 was to declare a "feature freeze" and to spend a couple of
months doing nothing but killing bugs. Wikipedia needs to do
essentially the same thing: stop adding new stuff until they get the
old stuff organized, at least a bit more. Until they do, the bleeding
will not stop.
Kelly