[WikiEN-l] Presentation to readers

[Phil Sandifer]

On Feb 24, 2007, at 9:35 PM, William Pietri wrote:

>
> Setting aside the painful topic of notability, is this a sign that we
> could use a different division between what restaurants call "front of
> house" and "back of house"? I'm looking at the various maintenance
> templates:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_maintenance_templates
>
> Some are important warnings that really belong at the top of pages,
> either because they are about unreliable content or because it's only
> fair to let people know that an article might be axed.
>
> Putting them all at the top of an article made sense early on, when  
> the
> ratio of editors to readers was higher. But at some point, wouldn't we
> want to hide more of the plumbing where the average reader never  
> sees it
> unless the go looking?

Another thought on this topic.

What if we replaced all of our problem tags with something generic -  
{{notverygood}} or something. I'm thinking wording along the lines of:

"This article isn't very good yet. If you came here to learn about  
this topic, we apologize that we aren't able to help you as well as  
we'd like. If you know a bit about this topic already, please feel  
free to help to fix it. Some concerns people have are probably  
located on the talk page."

And then the mass of other stuff - {{npov}}, {{unverified}},  
{{notability}}, etc could all move to the talk page. This puts a  
reader-friendly face forward, while retaining the information about  
what's wrong for editors.

-Phil