On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 07:16:49PM -0000, Tony Sidaway wrote:
Fred Bauder said:
We could have two recent changes, one that has everything, another that has pages of interest, a sort of watchlist for everyone that had all pages that were embroiled in controversy listed.
That's easy enough to do. I think there is already a page for listing controversial articles. Suppose it's called [[Wikipedia:Foo]], a link to get recent changes related to articles listed on this page would be something like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchangeslinked/Wikipedia:Foo
Just pop that on your user page and click it when you want to watch recent changes to controversial articles.
The problem here is that it depends on someone listing the article as a controversial article on some other page. Presently, I suspect there are a lot more edit wars than ever get listed on WP:RFC or any other repository for problems. Moreover, I think we might not even know where many of those problems are, because waiting for people to report them publicly is no guarantee they ever get reported.
Telling people to figure out for themselves when a dispute has become a problem, and to go list it on some "Controversial Articles" list, is already problematic. It's instruction creep. It doesn't help the new contributor who's gotten in over his/her head and doesn't know about all the N different ways to ask for help. And it doesn't help when the two (or more) parties to a dispute don't realize that their little disagreement has crossed the line into being destructive for Wikipedia.
We've already got mediation, RfC, peer review, and so on. We definitely don't need another way for editors who -know- there's a problem, and -know- how to ask for help, to do so. (We might need fewer.) What I'm thinking of is to pick up on problems -before- the editors involved realize that they're in a bad spot. Repeated reverts are a danger sign that should be *automatically* detectable.
Heck, we've had revert wars over whether or not an article should have an {{npov}} tag on it -- a tag that basically says "we're having a disagreement, come see the talk page". That should be a sign right there that expecting people to notice on their own when their own behavior is part of a problem in need of others' attention is not a complete solution.