After some more thought on the origins of stub articles and a better overview of the contents of the Swedish Wikipedia, it is clear that very few individuals are responsible for creating large numbers of stubs, a few years back. Now, depending on religion (mergists, deletionists...), these should either be deleted, improved, merged or put on lists of necessary quality improvements. Either way, it's a lot of work and it would have been better to have stopped those invidiuals back then. At least we want to stop such individuals today, so the same mistake isn't repeated while the old mess is being cleaned up.
What we want is to foster a spirit of writing better articles, improving the one you started, before you start the next one. But instead of increased patrolling and speedy deletions, this could be implemented in the Mediawiki software. If a user (logged in or IP address) tries to create a new page, their recent contribution history could be checked, and if any of their five most recently created articles (except redirects) are shorter than, say, 300 bytes, they would simply be unable to create another article. This would be a very soft kind of blocking (as soon as you have improved your existing article, you can start the next one), each case being completely an affair between the user and the software, not involving opinions of individual admins. Such an extension (is there an "article creation hook"?) could be fully parameterized, so each community could decide where to set the limits (5 recently created articles, 300 bytes), and what message to show to the user who violates these limits. Has this been suggested before? Has it been implemented? Would it be a really bad idea to suggest this? -- Lars Aronsson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
