On 11/04/11 11:24 PM, Carcharoth wrote:
Thanks for that. And for looking into the history of
that. The fact
that the tag stayed there for so long doesn't surprise me at all. Most
casual editors, if they don't know how the system works, will assume
that someone else will deal with the tag and eventually remove it.
This is one reason backlogs got so big, because only a small
proportion of editors actually use the tags and their workflows in a
systematic manner, and this doesn't include the vast majority of
casual editors.
I suppose this also has some relationship to the bystander phenomenon,
where a victim will more likely be helped if there is only one witness
to an accident than many.
One other thing has struck me about the reliability of
tagging, and
that is the fact that most of the articles I use to look up stuff most
days (from high-traffic articles to relatively obscure stuff) tends
not to have tags (though some do). I think this is an indication in
same way that stuff that people look at and care about gets edited and
improved enough that they don't get tagged (or the tags are removed),
but that stuff that is tagged but not fixed may tend to be the stuff
that readers and editors don't really care about enough (again, stats
of article traffic for the backlogs would help immensely here). The
few times I've dipped into the backlog, I've recoiled at the stuff
being written about and then tagged as they are mostly borderline
notable and I just can't bring myself to help out with stuff that
frankly arouses no interest in me and I'm never likely to need to
refer to as a reader.
When I look at an article as an ordinary reader looking for information
I mostly don't notice if it has been referenced, and I've learned to
ignore the tags that are there. I sometimes wish that they were at the
bottom of the page where they are less visible. The information already
there will usually satisfy me. Unless I want to look more deeply into
the matter, or something sounds suspicious I have no need to look at the
references.
Sectioning is a kind of fix that can be done without seeking outside
information. Those people who add this tag could just as easily fix it
themselves.
One possible test for notability is to ask whether they are more or less
notable than our many articles on second string sports figures and
entertainers.
Ray