Steve Bennett wrote:
Ben Kovitzbkovitz@acm.org wrote:
attention to tags? I know it's 2009, and I know tags will never go away, but most tags still strike me as both anti-wiki and page clutter. If a page has a problem, fix it.
That attitude is "anti-wiki". I can diagnose far more problems than I have time, knowledge or inclination to fix. Fixing is better than tagging. Tagging is better than ignoring.
This is a good point. The traditional wiki way is to always be "live": no "under construction", no tags, just a real, functioning product right now. To make an improvement, you just make the improvement. But, as I frequently need to be reminded, "Wikipedia is not typical". While I have seen some wikis degenerate into vast sets of pages that offer almost no content right now, but promise lots of content and fixes in the future, that hasn't happened on Wikipedia. By and large, tagging has worked well.
It sounds like tagging would work well with drug safety information, but as David Goodman has pointed out, the real issue is not how to get the attention of editors, but conscious disagreement about whether that information belongs on Wikipedia. Indeed this might not be best resolved in the usual "just do it" wiki way. Or perhaps there is a "just do it" approach that would address the concerns of the people who have opposed posting the information.
Ben