User talk:WereSpielChequers/Newpage proposal

You'll probably be surprised that I agree with much of this. I know we differ on the new rule that has been passed by consensus, and I think its fair trial will clearly reveal what both you and I want to know. If the results of the trial provide conclusive evidence that we can significantly reduce the 80% of new articles that are clearly not appropriate for inclusion, then it is, IMO a good solution. If, on the other hand (taking into account the current natural decline in new articles), it demonstrates a significant reduction in the number of acceptable articles, then it is not a good solution. The goal of this solution is to reduce the involvement on NPPers, who appear to be incorrigible, and the load on the servers that continue to store all the trash that gets sent in. Hazarding a guess, there must be nearly as many deleted pages on the server as live articles. This naturally also reflects in the cost of running and maintaining Wikipedia, and indeed the Foundation, not to mention the time of the admins who have to delete CSD pages and spend interminable time at AfD and its consequences, and blocking the users who persistently create and recreate unsuable pages. The trade off is a better implementation of the time of those who prefer to work on all these housekeeping tasks.

I believe it is a fallacy for us to continue to maintain our policy in assuming that all vandals, spammers, and creators of other totally inappropriate pages can be retained as serious, mature, and enthusiastic Wikipedians.

The suggestions you make are excellent. However, they mainly incur far-reaching changes/additions to the interface, and our current system of obtaining consensus for their implementation would take a very long time - let us not forget the quagmire of discussion for getting something as simple as BLPPROD approved and up and running.

The Outreach project has made a first start by improving the welcome system for new users but we are still stuck with the limitations of wiki software. The article wizard with its graphic buttons is a very good idea in principle, but fails by presenting the new user with walls of text at each stage. Not only are most people unlikely to read all those instructions, but many simply click through with complete disregards for the advice, until they arrive at the article template page; others might even give up with it and just decide to edit on their userspace or on an empty live page. To be realistic, it's the possibility of creating new live pages that needs to be limited, but in a way that is attractive to new users. I'm a firm believer that a nice page to play with, such as the online web builders, could create more enthusiasm, especially when the button is pressed to see the final version, and then 'You can now post your new article for everyone to see on the Wikipedia'. I am surprised that with the human resources we dispose of, it is not possible to present our page creation system in an easy way, using modern content management scripts such as for example, Jumla, Moodle, and Drupal that focus on interaction and collaborative construction of content which is in continual evolution.

Your suggestions are exactly what are needed in a new, genuinely inter-active wizard that would be fun to play with, while making it clear at the same time, through software blocks, that the page being created might have little chance of escaping the admins' delete buttons.
Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:58, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, I want to kick the idea around a few people and then ask Tom Morris or Magnus Manske to look at it. I'm hoping to get some stats on CSDs by deletion type which should enable us to reopen the G7 delete bot idea - there are certain checks one could put into an admin bot that would enable it to do most U1 and G7 deletes whilst still leaving the minority that could occasionally be problematic to be manually sifted.

As for keeping all vandals spammers and pretty much anyone other than Nazis and Pedos, I don't think that is the intent, going through a series of warnings reduces the risk of false positives and incorrect blocks, whilst treating vandals as troublesome kids is a longterm investment. IMHO we only need sufficient process so that kids remember being treated fairly but firmly. I suspect that the thrill of getting warnings may be what motivates some of them, and OTT responses could be what provokes the occasional flyby vandal who becomes persistent. ϢereSpielChequers 13:45, 25 August 2011 (UTC)