If we're going to improve the quality of new articles, we'll going to need an actual quality check, not just a block on anonymous editors' ability to start articles. Most of new articles don't meet basic quality standards. A significant number are so bad that they need to be speedily deleted, or put on AFD. I suggest that we tackle this by putting all new articles into an approval queue - they shouldn't appear on Wikipedia unless they meet basic quality standards. If a reviewing editor judges that the article meets an objective set of criteria, it should be "published". If not, the submitted new article should either be deleted or sorted into a "needs improvement" category outside the main namespace. Here's some background data on the problem. I checked 50 new articles tonight, all created between 22:46 and 23:03. I graded them into five categories as follows: * Speedy deletion fodder (falling into the categories set out in [[WP:CSD]]): - 10 articles (20% of the total) * Sufficiently poor to warrant a deletion vote ([[WP:AFD]]): - 2 articles; 1 of them a copyvio, 1 a probable spamvertisement (2% of the total) * Serious content problems (no wikilinking or references, badly written, non-English; generally these were just plain blocks of text dumped into Wikipedia): - 7 articles (14% of the total) * No obvious problems with content, but problems with the formatting, spelling or layout: - 12 articles (24% of the total) * No obvious problems - 19 articles (38% of the total) Note that I didn't check whether the content was *accurate*, merely whether it was organised, formatted etc in accordance with Wikipedia standards. As these figures indicate, the majority of new articles created during this period failed the quality check. Nearly a quarter failed so badly that they were worth deleting. This certainly accords with my previous experiences in monitoring [[Special:Newpages]]. We already have a huge amount of crap in the database, as we all know. Unfortunately the problem is getting bigger all the time. No amount of work to fix existing articles is going to help if we don't also fix the problem of poor-quality new articles being published. We're effectively trying to bail out a leaky boat while the water is still entering. Note also that quite a few of the speedy deletions were things like personal attacks, patent nonsense, tests etc (e.g. "wow, hey carly, i cant believe i can put this on a site! :O its so cool!"). I strongly suspect that people wouldn't submit this sort of thing if they knew that they wouldn't see it appearing instantly on a Wikipedia page. So how could we deal with this? Three measures, I think: 1) New articles should go somewhere outside the main namespace until reviewed and passed. They should *not* immediately enter the main namespace. 2) We need a simple, clearly defined set of criteria for assessing whether an article passes the grade. Is it wikilinked? Written in English? Correctly formatted? Includes references? etc etc... 3) Reviewing editors should assess newly created articles against these criteria. If the article passes, the article should be cleared to enter the main namespace. If not, it should be sorted into a queue to deal with whatever the problem is. For instance, an article lacking any wikilinks and incorrectly spelled should first be sorted into a "needs links" queue, then moved to a "needs spelling corrections", then finally moved to the main namespace. Because reviewing editors would necessarily need to be people with a bit of experience of editing, I would limit the ability to review and approve new articles to editors with a certain number of edits - say 500+. However, any editor should be able to work on improving a queued article. Any thoughts on this idea? - ChrisO ___________________________________________________________ NEW Yahoo! Cars - sell your car and browse thousands of new and used cars online! http://uk.cars.yahoo.com/