This is a failed proposal. Consensus for its implementation was not established within a reasonable period of time. If you want to revive discussion, please use the talk page or initiate a thread at the village pump.

This is a proposal to require community approval of new articles.

There are hundreds of new Wikipedia articles created per hour, to the point that there are tremendous numbers of barely passable stubs on Wikipedia. Forcing the Wikipedia community to approve each potential new article would improve overall quality of articles, especially stubs.

Firstly, the right to create article-namespace pages would be reserved for administrators only.

Say a user (anonymous or registered) wants to create the article Houston, Texas.

1. A subpage of WikiProject Texas is created for any new Texas-related articles: for example, "Wikipedia:WikiProject Texas/Articles considered for creation", with a list of all requested Texas-related articles.
2. The user who wanted to write the article would create a subpage: "Wikipedia:WikiProject Texas/Articles considered for creation/Houston, Texas", where he or she would draft the article and, on the talk page, provide a rationale for including the article. This user would also include a link to the page in the list on the aforementioned Articles considered for creation page.
3. Over the course of the next 7 days, all members of the Texas WikiProject can make improvements to the proposed article and discuss it on the proposed article's talk page.
4. At the end of 7 days, "Wikipedia:WikiProject Texas/Articles considered for creation/Houston, Texas" is edit-protected, and a vote to decide if the proposed article should, in its current form, be included in the article namespace is taken on the page's talk page for the next 24 hours .
   1. If a majority vote not to include the article:
      1. All references to the proposed article on WikiProject Texas's Articles considered for creation page and subpages are deleted.
   2. If a majority vote to include the article:
      1. All references to the proposed article on WikiProject Texas's Articles considered for creation page and subpages are deleted.
      2. Houston, Texas, is listed on a list of all articles that passed the process, named "Wikipedia:Articles pending creation" or something similar. The article is transferred to "Wikipedia:Articles pending creation/Houston, Texas".
      3. An administrator copies the article into the main-namespace "Houston, Texas".
      4. All references to the article on the "Articles pending creation" page and subpages are deleted.

There are several drawbacks to this proposal. They include:

• The proposal would discourage recruitment of new users and creation of desirable articles. Wikipedia lacks the capability to reliably predict or measure the magnitude of these effects.
• Due to the periods of discussion and voting on an article, any article covering an important current event could not be created in the main namespace until eight or more days later than its start.
• There would be a huge demand for Criteria for speedy creation. Malcontents would want an appeals court. Such measures would blossom into a new layer of instruction creep.
• Voting to determine if an an article should be transferred to the main namespace or not is a fairly subpar system, as per Wikipedia is not an experiment in democracy.
• Article-creating bots would have to be given greater privileges than human users, when they ought to have fewer.
• Currently the major discussion forum for deciding the fate of an article is Articles for Deletion. Creating a second forum would lead to a divergence in ideologies between the two, as different users will choose to participate; systematic conflicts would result.
• The appearance of a bad article on Special:Newpages is often beneficial because it coincides with the insertion of bad material into existing articles. Finding the new article helps patrollers to quickly find and revert these changes.

Please add and/or change anything that you see fit.