New articles - making democracy and motivating newbies

I really like the idea of having a "Draft Article" system. It makes article creation a much less abrupt experience for newbies (And everyone, really), but it also doesn't damage the encyclopedia's ability to keep itself clean of vanity-cruft, hoaxes, attack articles, etc. I'm sure it wouldn't be perfect, but simply moving new articles to somewhere where they can't "hurt anything" will remove a lot of the tension from the system and let everyone sit back and do things at their own pace.

This already works reasonably well when people, on their own, craft an article in user space, ask for comments from a related wikiproject, and then not post it until it's a nice and useful article. So an official "Draft Article" system would just taking a process already shown to work and making it easy to do.

I agree with everything Dream of Nyx said here except his number six. Having to gather ten admins together to speedy-delete means that the draft space will be full of horrible stuff never intended to be a real article. (How fast could you gather ten admins to take down a "Draft Article" full of celebrity porn? After you'd gone through that rigmarole a couple of times, would you bother? Or just look the other way and hope someone else cleans it up?)

I think that instead of a technical restrictions, much tighter rules on what qualifies for Speedy Delete in "Draft Article"-space would be enough.

I'd also add that any sort of "Draft Article" system should tag the articles so that they don't turn up in Google. That way people won't have much incentive to game the system with self-promotional articles they know will never pass.

(My username doesn't work with the unified login, but I'm User:APL on en.Wikipedia.)

no no no! The problem is wikipedia is scared to fail. Wikipedia must learn that having rubbish articles on display is perfectly OK. All you need is a decent rating system so anyone at a glance can see it is an unregulated article. Or a filter so a user can hide such articles. but the default must be all articles are visible and come up in searches and.....rubish articles are fine. The problem is people obviosuly will not do something they are prevented from doing.

Ok, I absolutely agree stick with all suggested (Dream of Nyx). But what to do about pornographic articles, for example? For easily avoiding the return of evil administrators (and groups of them), the system may have automatic intelligent filters to prevent articles with certain words or suspect images. A machine and not a man could automatically move this article to a reserved space, contact the editor and explain the issues. However must be tolerance to accept some temporary bad articles (this is a inevitable feature in any system) that cheated the system.

I've been described by one deletionist as a "hemp clad sandal wearing inclusionist" despite my doing over five thousand deletions on the English Wikipedia. But even I would contend that every day we get articles that say awful things about people, articles that deservedly get deleted in minutes. Having seen some of the cyber-bullying pages and other contributions by "friends of gays" I think it is really important that we continue to delete bad faith articles, blatant spam and ones that assert non-notability "x is my girlfriend, our high school prom Queen and the most beautiful girl in the world".

I like the suggestion that we enable all logged in users to access their own "deleted" edits (we have oversight and revision delete when we really need to delete stuff).

But for good faith contributors we could do something very different to what we do now, hence my proposal elsewhere on this wiki Proposal:Speedy deletion - 24 hour pause for some articles