[WikiEN-l] How to clear a backlog

[phoebe ayers]

On 12/10/06, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:

>
> You want to ugly up major articles with "merge from" templates for obscure
> orphans? Why? You won't get things done even by having todo templates fly
> across every article on the site in flashing red reindeer-shaped boxes.
> Merging does not need to be centralised, it's a simple task which can be
> done by any interested editor. Like every other editorial task, it can be
> organised from the wikiprojects, perhaps with a rotation of requests on a
> wiki-wide forum like the community portal.
>
> -- Tim Starling


The merge category has kept track of how many articles have been in it over
time, though the numbers aren't up to date. The last time there was a
(recorded) maintenance collaboration of the week for merges, a year ago, the
number of articles to be merged only fell by 160 or so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_talk:Articles_to_be_merged
Hey, at that rate, it'll only take 62 weeks to clean up the category,
assuming nothing else gets added to it of course.

As Utkarshraj said, subject knowledge is helpful for merging (which
shouldn't be a simple redirect, if there's anything of substance to the
article), which makes this task slightly more difficult for an editor
without that subject knowledge (this has less to do with the text itself,
I've found, and more to do with questions of whether thing A is really the
same as thing B, and does thing A deserve its own article. Merge tags often
get placed on an article without any accompanying helpful commentary). Placing
complimentary 'mergeto' tags on the major article in question simply means
that more people who work in that subject are likely to see it & do
something about it, which doesn't seem too problematic to me.

Of course, merging is small potatoes compared to the backlogs in some other
major cleanup categories, like factchecking and cleanup itself (not least
because particularly poor articles tend to get placed in multiple
categories).

-- phoebe