On 11/20/06, Cheney Shill <halliburton_shill(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
I'm not sure if it would be useful for anything
beyond tags
that apply to articles as a whole, but it seems like a
useful way for identifying common problems like spin-offs
(or whatever you call the problem when someone
intentionally creates a new article to support their
personal agenda).
"POV forks", believe it or not.
Tagging is all we want to get out of these drive-by-ers. We have
articles that don't average an edit per month, but may get something
like 10 page views. If one of those viewers can just alert us to the
fact that there's something badly wrong that can be fixed (slander,
plagiarism etc), then we're much better off than we are now.
3) automatically keep a count of how many users (e.g.,
5)
think the articles should be combined before official
merger nomination thingees are inserted into the articles.
Since we're really talking about non-Wikipedians alerting us to stuff,
it's probably not appropriate for their 5 second interaction to result
in a change to the article itself. They won't know the policies,
guidelines etc relating to when articles should and shouldn't be
merged. But letting us know that there are two really similar (and in
their view, confusingly so) articles would be great.
I guess I'm picturing a model where people can easily flag a problem,
and that flag is listed both at the article and at some central
repository as an issue that should be addressed pretty urgently. Other
people can then come past and take action, either by inserting the
appropriate merge templates, adding {{copyvio}} or whatever. With some
knowledge of what they're doing...and if the original flagger is
mistaken, they can simply replace {{flagged problem}} with {{no
problem}} or something.
It might also reduce admin annoyances/work where more
active readers not familiar with all the wiki bureaucracy
simply de-duplicate the articles themselves, blanking 1
duplicate and adjusting the other, only to have an admin
auto-revert all the potentially helpful work.
Definitely.
Steve