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

Mon Dec 5 16:02:00 UTC 2005

Tim Starling 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.

I would say that whether or not the experiment beginning today on
preventing anons from creating *any* articles works, we might try this
one as well (after a couple of weeks, say) as a "softer" solution.

> 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.

Yes.

--Jimbo