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.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers 13:45, 25 August 2011 (UTC)