At 12:32 PM 8/25/2004 -0400, Delirium wrote:
I think this is definitely true, and not just because people misperceive that they have to act now. Things get caught on recent changes and new articles, but if they don't get caught there, they often essentially never get caught. When using the "random pages" feature (as I do quite a bit), I've run into complete junk, sometimes outright vandalism (like "bob is gay") that has been there since _2002_.
Cleanup is supposed to address some of this problem, but I'm not qualified to say whether it's worked or not.
Here's an idea; how about adding a "summon editor attention" link or button that places the article into a page similar to recentchanges? This way people who can't or won't fix an article's problems can still very easily get it noticed by others who might, without all the hassle of going to the Cleanup page and editing it. This'd be a really quick and dirty way of saying "hey, I found something that looks broken!", and if it's easy enough it might even get used by anonymous browsers who otherwise wouldn't bother to contribute to Wikipedia at all. One shouldn't even need to type in a reason why attention is being called, since in theory this is for pointing out obvious stuff.
I suppose it could be abused by spamming the "recentattention" queue with articles that don't actually need it, but it'd take a pretty dedicated abuser to make recentattention flood faster than recentchanges does. :) Since clicking the link doesn't actually do anything to the article, and stuff on recentattention would drop off on its own after a few days anyway, I don't see how spamming would do any lasting harm.