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

Mon Dec 5 12:08:20 UTC 2005

On 12/5/05, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> 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.
>

Technicaly It is pretty simple (just makeing some alterations to the
text in the mediawiki namespace would be enough to stop most cases).
The problem is the few cases where there may be a legit reason to
create orphans.

> 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

No so much. The idea is to limit the creation of articles no one cared
about. If an article is not an orphan then hopefully it means that at
least one other person though wikipedia should have the article.

--
geni