[WikiEN-l] Experiment on new pages

Mon Dec 5 15:56:36 UTC 2005

Delirium wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> 
>> But preveneting anons from creating new pages is a different matter, and
>> it seems a worthy time to make an experiment of it.
>>  
>>
> I suppose I'm not really sure what this will buy us.  It only takes away
> the class of problems: "page doesn't exist, anon creats a bad one". 
> These are actually among the easiest to spot.  Much harder are: "page
> exists as a stub, anon adds a sentence to it that is bad".  These are
> harder to spot, and this does not address that; in fact, it will
> encourage troublesome anons to just find existing articles to put
> misinformation into, rather than creating new ones.  I think, on the
> whole, that would be *more* of a problem.

Yes.  I think there are many different kinds of troublesome anons.  I
think a part of what will help in this case is to reduce the overall
volume of *noise* that people patrolling have to deal with, which will
give them more time to look at those stubs.

But, it's an experiment.  We all have a priori views on what will or
won't be the consequences, and at least we should proceed experimentally
to see if this helps or not.  If not, we try something else.  Calvinball.

--Jimbo