Phil Boswell wrote:
"Delphine Ménard" notafishz@gmail.com wrote
Sure. Let me just take a look... [[Category:NPOV disputes]] 1800 articles tagged. [[Category:Articles which may be biased]] 196 articles tagged [[Category:Accuracy disputes]] 1000 articles tagged [[Category:Pages needing attention]] 198 articles tagged [[Category:Possible copyright violations]] 199 articles tagged Of course, my "urgent request" will be taken care of within the hour.
So modify your reply to the complainer: instead of saying "oh yes, I've taken care of it personally; you don't need to do anything" try saying "as per normal Wikipedia procedure I've tagged it for urgent treatment. Please feel free to help out yourself."
Maybe you can recruit editors this way, and at least they'll start with some sort of motivation. Obviously someone would want to check that said motivation didn't carry them away :-)
This just isn't practical. If we have an irate politician writing to us and threatening to sue, "fix it yourself" just isn't going to wash. Especially if there are three regular POV-warriors sitting on the article day and night putting the problem text back.
We have to accept that not all people with a complaint are willing or able to edit. And I somehow doubt that "well he could have edited it every day for three months to keep it ok" will be a good defence in a libel case. Or worse - "he should have tried using the dispute resolution process"
We /do/ often encourage people writing to info-en to join the project. But it's simply not appropriate in all cases. And those where it isn't are generally the ones with the potential to blow up in our faces big-time.
--sannse