Creating a page on Wikipedia

For WMF employee / slave nonsense, developer hijinks, and MediaWiki and related software screw-ups.
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Creating a page on Wikipedia

Post by Bbb23sucks » Thu May 18, 2023 7:40 am

You would think that there would be a feature allowing you to create a page on Wikipedia. After all, it has 6 million articles, so there must be a simple button to do so. Well you would be WRONG! There is STILL no special page to create pages or articles.

How is this still not a feature in MediaWiki? Why is the official advice still to go to a dead url and create a page from there?

Eventually, some was fed up enough that they made an extension. Yet this extension is neither a part of MediaWiki core, nor installed on enwiki. Or any WMF wiki for that matter.
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Re: Creating a page on Wikipedia

Post by Boink Boink » Thu May 18, 2023 8:22 am

You're forgetting that Wikipedia(ns), the people who control Wikipedia, don't want anyone to create anymore new articles.

They especially don't want newbies creating articles, because In their sheer arrogance they now believe Wikipedia is so important and so complicated that you need to have hundreds of hours of experience and have read thousands of words of guidance before you can graduate to the hallowed position of Article Creator.

It's obvious nonsense. The basics of Wikipedia haven't changed in a decade.

The wikicode of even a non-stub Start Class article, with headings and magic words, runs to barely a hundred characters. The code for a citation template, is a handful. Newbies obviously don't need to know what It means, they only need to know where to put their words, and enter the urls/titles/dates of their referencss.

It takes ten minutes at most to teach a person in normal people words what a Wikipedia article is meant to be (a summary of something important, importance defined as being written about in multiple authoritative sources to some depth). It takes ten minutes more to tell them about the required tone and the basics of neutrality, assuming simply telling them to write their summary in a neutral and impersonal tone isn't sufficient.

It is therefore quite clear that enabling a compete newbie to get the rush of creating a new article (this being what hooks them into Wikipedia addiction) is very very easy. One click stuff. It would also be a good way of quickly identifying people who will likely never be very good at Wikipedia, since if they can't produce a decent article with this level of babying, they are probably an idiot.

As well as wanting to make their hobby seem hard (so they can justify wasting years becoming an expert in something the real world doesn't even consider a trade, never mind a profession), the wikishits don't want any new articles because they already know the Wikipedia community is now so small and dysfunctional it can barely cope with managing what they have. A fair few Wikipedians are of course stupid enough to genuinely believe Wikipedia is already finished. They are that thick.

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