On Sat, 02 Oct 2004 15:58:30 +0200, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
There is something I do not understand.
Some editors are putting some "clean up" flag on some articles. The resulting information is ugly and defacing the article. There is no indication of why the article should be cleaned up, neither in the talk page, nor in the clean up page.
Ex : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flax or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat
I notice both these examples have now been reverted. Personally, I see very little point in any "labelling" of this kind. Any issues with an article should surely be discussed on that article's Talk: page; that's what it's there for. In fact, I've just had a thought:
For cleanup listings, all we want to do is have a central point to draw attention to issues, which should be explained on Talk: pages. Therefore, why don't we have Category:Cleanup consisting of the Talk pages, rather than the articles?
Personally, I quite like the idea of Cleanup as a category, with justifications on talk pages. This would give us a central list to work through (the category listing) but also have equal access to the reasons and discussions from both ends (there's a complaint on Wp_talk:Cleanup about a page where things were mentioned on [[Wikipedia:Cleanup]] but not the talk page). And removing a category tag automatically removes the listing, without having to hunt through reams of archives to see if it is, actually, listed somewhere.
The only thing we (or rather, people who actually use the list; I can't say I ever have) *lose* is being able to glance down summaries of what needs doing, but this could be mitigated by splitting it into sub-categories. This could also let people put big fat labels on pages in really dire need of attention, but not ones where they just weren't sure what to do about a particular passage.
OK, so it's Yet Another Article Cleanup Suggestion, but categoires are still relatively new and unexplored, so what are people's thoughts?