Tony Sidaway wrote:
Karl A. Krueger said: [...]
The problem here is that it depends on someone listing the article as a controversial article on some other page. Presently, I suspect there are a lot more edit wars than ever get listed on WP:RFC or any other repository for problems. Moreover, I think we might not even know where many of those problems are, because waiting for people to report them publicly is no guarantee they ever get reported.
Yes. Well, a way around this is to identify templates that are highly likely to be associated with an edit war, and put those templates into a category, which would result in controversial articles appearing in the category. Using the same mechanism on the category would give you another view of possibly explosive articles. Wikis are designed to be open and flexible so it's unlikely that any single mechanism will ever be able to identify all controversial articles without fail. Adopting the UNIX standard of "works in most cases" is good enough, because other users will adopt other methods to identify the controversial articles. --~~~~
The real problem that arises, I think, is in new articles. If someone from, say, the Stormfront crew creates a new article loaded with bias from day one, it's entirely possible it my fly in under radar (as 'twere) for quite some time without being noticed.
-- Chad