Robth wrote:
On 10/16/06, Rory Stolzenberg rory096@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/16/06, Robth robth1@gmail.com wrote:
{{Cleanup}} is a ticket to a year-long line. If we want to get these issues addressed with any kind of speed (and it's clear from the start of this thread that we do), any system that we come up with needs to be as unlike {{cleanup}} as possible.
Personally, I suspect that the only way to handle these things is to do them yourself. I long ago gave up on the notion of article tags being an effective way to get anything but the most trivial (and thus edit-count-building) maintenance work done.
Not true, cleanup also has a huge amount of articles, and while there's a backlog, there's also a lot of people working on it. Currently, [[Category:Articles with unsourced statements]] has a massive, totally disorganized backlog, and was actually deleted a couple months ago because it was so hopeless. A cleanup-like system would be a huge improvement, and allow us to take care of the ones that most need sourcing first.
I'm well aware of the situation; I spent several months doing a lot of cleanup work before getting burned out on it. There are people working on cleanup, it is true. At the same time, the backlog is growing rapidly, and an (admittedly, highly unscientific) examination of what happens to de-tagged articles that I did in August suggested that much of what gets de-tagged doesn't actually get cleaned up much. My point above was that, in general, maintenance tags are not the answer; they lead people to assume that they can get something fixed just by sticking a tag on it, when in fact the only way to get something fixed in a timely fashion (and sometimes at all) is to do it yourself.
How about a function that will let you tag something and after 7 days (or a month or whatever) a bot will leave a note on YOUR talk page that the tag has not been removed. This would allow people to tag things that they are not comfortable removing, but only really encourage people to use the tags if they have the intention of following up.
SKL