Michael Noda wrote:
On 2/27/07, Rich Holton <richholton(a)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