Michael Noda wrote:
On 2/27/07, Rich Holton richholton@gmail.com wrote:
FWIW, I think that decreasing the average workload of the "hyperactives" should be a major priority. The quality of their work will improve, the number of fatigue-related problems will decrease, and there may be less hesitation in de-sysopping one of them.
I wholeheartedly agree. One thing that jumps out from the list of deleters that geni posted (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dragons_flight/deleterlist if you missed it) is that about a third of the 840 admins listed have not made a single deletion in the last 500,000. Hardly an example of leveraging of the long tail!
Part of the problem from my perspective is figuring out what to do in some of these tasks. I typically do this "janitorial" work in bursts---I'll do a bunch of recent-changes patrolling for three weeks, because I'm in the mood for it, or clear out copyright violations for a day, then I won't do anything for two months. When I come back to one of these tasks after an absence, it takes concerted effort to navigate the web of rules and templates and informal policies. Even simple stuff like, "so what's the current policy on warning/blocking vandals, and which of the 100+ user warning templates should I use?". It tends to lead to me doing a small subset of things I feel confident in my familiarity with (new-article and recent-changes patrolling, mainly, and some prod-clearing), and avoiding anything else. To be fair, some parts of our "process" do have concise documentation on the relevant page with nicely laid out bold text saying something like "If you're just wondering how to do [x], do these steps: 1, 2, 3, 4", and in those cases it's easier to get into them.
On the topic of bots but with a slightly different intent, some automation of drudgery would help make this work more appealing. Nobody likes to do work that is super-repetitive and requires no human judgment. Clearing out the batches of images tagged "orphan fair use" is annoying and I usually avoid doing it, because at least 50% of them are trivially mistagged due to not being orphaned (perhaps they were when tagged, but they aren't now), and so I end up spending most of my time just deleting the template and pasting in a "not orphaned" edit summary. A bot could do that for me, letting me as the human look only at the *actually* orphaned fair-use images to decide whether to delete them or not. There are a bunch of other examples. Incidentally, two nice examples of automation are the bots clearing WP:AIV, and the bot that goes around adding Template:SharedIPEDU to talk pages of IPs from universities and school districts.
-Mark