Research talk:Wikipedia article creation II

Counting deleted articles

The page currently says Deletion [] does not include moving to another title or namespace or turning into a redirect. For almost any likely purpose for the data, those two cases should included if possible when trying to understand what's happening to new creations. Or there could be an additional reported stat for them.

From an article-author's point of view, a redirection deletes their work just as much as a page deletion. From the community's point of view, we certainly see it as a removed article. Almost no one cares about the technicality that it was deleted via edit-button rather than admin-delete button.

Similarly, anyone trying to understand the fate of newly created articles usually only cares that an article moved out of mainspace is no longer an article. It may just be on an extremely slow track to deletion.

For example the WMF has been tracking how many articles are created with the Content Translation extension. On English Wikipedia there was a problem with a lot of unusably bad translations being created. Use of the extension was restricted. Many of the articles were either deleted or converted to redirects to far better pre-existing articles on the topic. A page that got redirected certainly shouldn't be counted as a translation-extension success case.

EnWiki has also been discussing new NewPagePatrol rules to start sending some newly created articles to draft space. And there's a proposed ACTRIAL experiment that might test the effect of sending non-autoconfirmed users to draft space when creating new articles. The moved-to-draftspace stat could be important for understanding actual outcomes. Alsee (talk) 22:21, 14 July 2017 (UTC)