[WikiEN-l] Re: A bold fix needed to the "omg backlog" problem

Mon Dec 5 02:41:33 UTC 2005

geni wrote:
> On 12/1/05, Alex Schenck <linuxbeak at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>Now, with that said, I need feedback. Please provide.
>>
>>--Linuxbeak
> 
> 
> Well as a deltionist admin even I feel you are going a little far.
> While I seem to recall that uncyclopedia did have a few weeks in which
> they cleared out at lot of rubish by allowing the admins to delete
> anything they felt was not up to par I don't think this would work on
> wikipedia.
> 
> My personal answer is that we should make it harder to create new
> articles in the first place. Probably by restricting the creating of
> orphans. Don't ask me how to do that though.

We can tell fairly easily whether a page will be an orphan before it is
created, it's an indexed query. So we could, say, prevent creation of
orphans by anons. I'm not sure what the effect would be. I can tell you that
currently, 205 of the 1498 articles in [[Category:Articles that need to be
wikified]] are orphans, I don't know how many were orphans when they were
created.

I guess this would prohibit the creation of articles that are created
casually, a few sentences about something the author cares about. But I
think the effect would be smaller for larger junk -- text copied from
homework essays or personal webpages for example. The contributors are
probably more motivated in that case.

-- Tim Starling