Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Proposal to require autoconfirmed status in order to create articles/Against


 * 1) If we apply our existing notability guidelines to all the cultures of the world, we have millions of potential new articles to write, most of which are not going to be written by the existing community.
 * 2) The Special:NewPages backlog is not yet close to be being maxed out (30 days).
 * 3) This change will make it more difficult for college students to create new articles as part of class assignments.
 * 4) This change will cause us to lose untold numbers of good new articles (even if they are the minority of the new articles that get created), and thus will be a net loss for the encyclopedia.
 * 5) This proposal is based mainly on opinions and anecdotes, rather that any systematic analysis of the problem.
 * 6) This proposal is against the grain of Wikipedia as manifest in Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
 * 7) This will drive off countless new users who create an article for the 'thrill' of it.
 * 8) It will cause a backlog at AFC and a large amount of work for people tidying up misplaced AFC tags and misplaced AFCs.
 * 9) Many "new" editors who create an account to start a new article have already edited as IP's, so the proposal might make little difference to the amount of editing experience new article authors have.
 * 10) We should focus on making it easier to create articles which meet Wikipedia's standards rather than adding more obstacles.

Responses


 * 1) "Most new editors do not start off by creating articles." Finding a user whose first edit is a creation of an article is easy. Any one of them can be a valuable contributor. In fact, it would be interesting to see the development of people who started out by creating an article with people who started out by edits to existing ones.