[WikiEN-l] Turn off article creation AND deletion.

Sat Dec 10 13:49:19 UTC 2005

On 12/9/05, Daniel P. B. Smith <wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com> wrote:
> How about this for an experiment: turn off article creation _and_
> deletion for a while? Freeze the table of contents (not that we have
> one)...
>
> So that all anyone could possibly do is to edit existing articles?
>
> It would force everyone to pay attention to the articles that exist
> already, and with 857,833 of them you'd think people could find
> something worth their attention.
>
> With deletion being impossible, AfD would become unnecessary... as
> would DRV. So, that should make one faction happy. On the other hand,
> there would be no opportunity to add subtrivial topics. (Or trivial
> topics, or significant topics). That should make another faction happy.

I wouldn't call it an experiment, because it's obvious that it's not a
long term solution.

I don't think it'd be horrible, if it were kept to no more than one
week a month.  Even then, you can't turn off deletion completely. 
Copyright infringements still have to be deleted.  Patent nonsense
probably should be deleted too (though one could argue for just
editing).  Test pages, pure vandalism, history merging, and
non-controversial page move deletion should be kept on too.  Not quite
all the speedy criteria, but the truly obvious ones, at least.

I dunno, might be interesting to try.

Anthony