Randy from Boise wrote:
What's really needed is to have the spigot of new articles tampered way the hell down. No starts possible until registration and 50 edits or something on existing articles.
Sorry if I have missed something. But ... what is the problem with the creation of new articles by newcomers? (that's a honest question)
I tended to create new articles whenever, in my normal reading, I stumbled across something that would obviously be useful generally.
An example: One of my interests is Christian Arabic literature. This is pretty obscure stuff, and sometimes I find myself wondering who on earth someone referenced was. Naturally I would do a google search, and sometimes I would find something in Wikipedia. Often I would not.
If there was something, it might be under a variant spelling and so hard to find (because Arabic is a defective script which can be transliterated into English and German in different ways), in which case (in the days when I contributed to Wikipedia) I would create an article under whatever spelling I had started with (or had encountered along the way) and make it a redirect, and update the article with whatever info I had. If none existed, and I had had to search around for this, then I would start an article with whatever I had. (In such a way the original article on
Michael the Syrian came into being).
I would have thought that this was a natural way for people -- especially scholars -- to become involved in Wikipedia; after having to conduct a search for some fairly basic information on someone relatively important, it seems only public spirited to donate that to the world.
That seems like a doorway into Wikipedia that it would be unwise to close?
All the best,
Roger Pearse