That hasn’t been entirely my experience. In fact, when I made the page for the Foreign Dredge Act of 1906, I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly others jumped in to improve on my basic efforts—it was clearly a case of just needing the page to exist at all before it started getting the attention it deserved.
By contrast, I’ve found that trying to do things like good article nominations, where you’re trying to satisfy the demands of self-selected nonexpert referees, can be frustrating. The same is true for trying to improve pages already getting a lot of attention. Even minor improvements to the Monkeypox page during the epidemic were the subject of heated debate and accusations on the talk page. When a new page is created, it doesn’t have egos invested in it yet, so you don’t really have to argue with anybody very much.
I’d be interested in learning more about your experiences that leads you to say it’s harder to create than improve pages. I’m not that novice but you seem like you have a lot more experience than me.
Epistemic status: ~150 Wikipedia edits, of which 0 are genuine article creations (apart from redirects). I’ve mostly done slight improvements on non-controversial articles. Dunno about being a novice, but looking at your contributions on WP you’ve done more than me :-)
I was thinking mostly of the fact that you need to be autoconfirmed, i.e. more than 4 days old and ≥10 edits. I also have the intuition that creating an article is more likely to be wasted effort than an improvement to an existing article, because of widespread deletionism. An example for the deletionism is the Harberger tax article, which was nearly removed, much to my dismay.
Perhaps this is more true for the kind of article I’m interested in, which is relatively obscure concepts from science (with less heated debate), and less about current events (where edits might be more difficult due to controversy & edit wars).
I have also encountered deletionism. When I was improving the aptamer article for a good article nomination, the reviewer recommended splitting a section on peptide aptamers into a separate article. After some thinking, I did so. Then some random editor who I’d never interacted with before deleted the whole peptide aptamer article and accused me of plagiarism/copying it from someplace else on the internet, and never responded to my messages trying to figure out what he was doing or why.
It’s odd to me because the Foreign Dredge Act is a political issue, while peptide aptamers are an extremely niche topic. And the peptide aptamer article contained nothing but info that had been on Wikipedia for years, while I wrote the Dredge Act article from scratch. Hard to see rhyme or reason, and very frustrating that there’s no apparent process for dealing with a vandal who thinks of themselves as an “editor.”
That hasn’t been entirely my experience. In fact, when I made the page for the Foreign Dredge Act of 1906, I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly others jumped in to improve on my basic efforts—it was clearly a case of just needing the page to exist at all before it started getting the attention it deserved.
By contrast, I’ve found that trying to do things like good article nominations, where you’re trying to satisfy the demands of self-selected nonexpert referees, can be frustrating. The same is true for trying to improve pages already getting a lot of attention. Even minor improvements to the Monkeypox page during the epidemic were the subject of heated debate and accusations on the talk page. When a new page is created, it doesn’t have egos invested in it yet, so you don’t really have to argue with anybody very much.
I’d be interested in learning more about your experiences that leads you to say it’s harder to create than improve pages. I’m not that novice but you seem like you have a lot more experience than me.
Epistemic status: ~150 Wikipedia edits, of which 0 are genuine article creations (apart from redirects). I’ve mostly done slight improvements on non-controversial articles. Dunno about being a novice, but looking at your contributions on WP you’ve done more than me :-)
I was thinking mostly of the fact that you need to be autoconfirmed, i.e. more than 4 days old and ≥10 edits. I also have the intuition that creating an article is more likely to be wasted effort than an improvement to an existing article, because of widespread deletionism. An example for the deletionism is the Harberger tax article, which was nearly removed, much to my dismay.
Perhaps this is more true for the kind of article I’m interested in, which is relatively obscure concepts from science (with less heated debate), and less about current events (where edits might be more difficult due to controversy & edit wars).
I have also encountered deletionism. When I was improving the aptamer article for a good article nomination, the reviewer recommended splitting a section on peptide aptamers into a separate article. After some thinking, I did so. Then some random editor who I’d never interacted with before deleted the whole peptide aptamer article and accused me of plagiarism/copying it from someplace else on the internet, and never responded to my messages trying to figure out what he was doing or why.
It’s odd to me because the Foreign Dredge Act is a political issue, while peptide aptamers are an extremely niche topic. And the peptide aptamer article contained nothing but info that had been on Wikipedia for years, while I wrote the Dredge Act article from scratch. Hard to see rhyme or reason, and very frustrating that there’s no apparent process for dealing with a vandal who thinks of themselves as an “editor.”