On 10/12/07, William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com> wrote:
What I'm thinking of instead is some sort of
subscription or commitment
thing. I've always wanted to build a Wikipedia bot, so likely I'd take
this opportunity. Suggestions welcome!
Yeah, that's what I want, a bot bossing me around! ;) Just kidding,
the idea sounds sort of fun. I'm sure a lot of us work only in a
particular niche, it might be beneficial to move out of that
occasionally.
If this would work it might solve a serious problem I think we have
also. Let's call it the magical-wishlist-effect. For example, you
*wish* articles were cleaned up, so you make a list of articles that
need cleaned up. Then make an easy template so everyone can slap it
all over the place, then add awesome parameters like date, then have a
bot auto date things, all the while the list gets longer and longer.
This happens because the people that DO cleanup articles are many less
than the number who slap that template on, and the time it takes to
completely reformat an article is not the same as the time it takes to
add a template at the top. There is a complete decoupling of the
queued work amount with the resources available to do it.
So, here's my pie-in-the-sky suggestion completely lacking
implementation details (naturally) :D
I think somehow we should link these. If cleanup has a huge backlog,
{{cleanup}} should stop working until it's fixed. This will serve as a
message that, at the time, people's resources would be better spent
cleaning articles rather than tagging them. Likewise tasks that are
not sustainable are recognized early rather than after the backlog is
completely unmanageable.
We need to learn a little more from biology I think, bossing people
around probably won't work. Better to make obvious with signaling what
needs to be done, and make the act of inappropriate signaling
(flagging things for processing without the required resources) less
possible.
Judson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cohesion