Wikipedia has gotten more elaborate and complex to use. Adding a reference, marking something for review, uploading a file or creating a new article now take many steps — and failing to follow them can lead to starting all over. The curators of the core projects are concerned with uniformly high quality, and impatient with contributors who don’t have the expertise and wiki-experience to create something according to policy. Good stubs or photos are deleted for failing to comply with one of a dozen policies, or for inadequate cites or license templates; even when they are in fact derived from reliable sources and freely licensed.<\/p>\n
The Article Creation Wizard<\/a> has a five-step process for drafting an article, after which it is submitted for review<\/a> by a team of experienced editors, and finally moved to the article namespace. 7 steps for approval is too much overhead for many. \u00a0And the current notability guidelines<\/a> on big Wikipedias excludes most local and specialist knowledge.<\/p>\n We need a simpler scratch-space to develop new material:<\/p>\n Since this will be a new sort of compendium or comprehensive cyclopedia, covering all topics, it should have a new name. Something simple, say Newpedia<\/strong>. Scripts can be written to help editors work through the most polished Newpedia items and push them to Wikipedia and Wikisource and Commons. We could invite editors to start doing their rough work on Newpedia, to avoid the conflict and fast reversion on the larger wiki references that make it hard to use for quick new work.<\/p>\n Update<\/strong>: Mako discussed Newpedia (or double-plus-newpedia) in his panel about “Wikipedia in 2022<\/em>“, and Erik Moeller talked about how the current focus on notability is keeping all of our projects from growing, in his “Ghosts of Wikipedia Future<\/em>“. \u00a0I look forward to the video and transcripts.<\/p>\n\n