[Foundation-l] Anons cannot create pages on english wikipedia?

Wed Dec 7 23:56:35 UTC 2005

On 12/7/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>
> >Maybe new page patrol needs to be more about researching and improving
> >new articles and less about "deleting crap".  The article that started
> >this whole discussion wasn't "crap".  It wasn't "nn cruft" or
> >"vanity".  But it did have some serious problems that could have been
> >resolved if more time was spent researching it.
> >
> >I'm not saying this to lay blame, after all new page patrol is a
> >volunteer effort so any help is better than nothing.  But if you're
> >ever "bored" I can think of a few million things to do, things that
> >are more important than "deleting crap" anyway.
> >
> >
> Well, they aren't really comparable activities.  New-page patrol for
> crap is a mindless activity that can be done to procrastinate and/or
> relieve stress.  Researching someone I've never heard of, don't care
> about, and don't have the resources available to research in the first
> place isn't.  On the occasions I *do* want to do serious research for
> Wikipedia, I prefer to do it on areas in which I either have expertise
> or at least some amount of interest (I have a long list of articles I
> care about that need improving or writing in the first place).  Perhaps
> some volunteers can be persuaded to do "random researching", but I
> suspect it will be relatively few.
>
> -Mark

After reading this, I find it hard to believe there isn't much much
more blatantly false content in the encyclopedia.  It does kind of
kill Jimbo's idea that "reduc[ing] the workload on the people doing
new pages patrol" will solve anything, though, assuming most new page
patrollers treat it the same way as you (limited to just "deleting
crap").  Suddenly I feel less bad about calling new page patrollers
firemen, but I should keep in mind that you don't speak for them all.

Anthony