On 12/11/06, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com < charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com> wrote:
theProject wrote
I see there are a lot of ideas for how to prevent future backlogs, but I
was
also hoping to encourage discussion as to how we can deal with the
backlogs
(all of the large ones) we've got right now.
Well, I started looking at the month-by-month, from start of 2006. The numbers of articles there are quite small, initially. A small sample suggests that many of the merge notices relate to merges that have had significant opposition. I took down a couple.
Rather than quoting a figure of 10000 in total, which no one feels they could have much impact in clearing, you might do better to look at older subcategories.
Charles
In part this is a technical issue; the merge-by-month category was just set up this September, and there wasn't a complete retrospective conversion done for older merge tags. Thus, September 2006 may contain articles that were tagged at any point in the past, though this is slowly getting cleared out. The months after September should be mostly accurate.
I was working on the backlog when the merge-by-month categories were implemented, and the simple act of sorting out the older requests from the newer ones was actually a huge step towards clearing it out; lots of articles got fixed or the merge tags were found to be no longer relevant and so on.
-- phoebe