[WikiEN-l] Presentation to readers

[William Pietri]

Phil Sandifer wrote:
> On Feb 24, 2007, at 9:35 PM, William Pietri wrote:
>
>   
>> I'm looking at the various maintenance
>> templates [...] wouldn't we
>> want to hide more of the plumbing where the average reader never  
>> sees it unless the go looking?
>>     
>
> Another thought on this topic.
>
> What if we replaced all of our problem tags with something generic -  
> {{notverygood}} or something. I'm thinking wording along the lines of:
>
> "This article isn't very good yet. If you came here to learn about  
> this topic, we apologize that we aren't able to help you as well as  
> we'd like. If you know a bit about this topic already, please feel  
> free to help to fix it. Some concerns people have are probably  
> located on the talk page."
>
> And then the mass of other stuff - {{npov}}, {{unverified}},  
> {{notability}}, etc could all move to the talk page. This puts a  
> reader-friendly face forward, while retaining the information about  
> what's wrong for editors.
>   

Nice. That's even better. I'd probably make {{notverygood}} less 
visually intrusive than some of the existing templates. Perhaps a paler 
blue with no border and italic text rather than roman.

Cons:

    * More manual labor when tagging and untagging articles
    * Possibility for main page and talk page to be out of sync
    * Easier to forget to remove a tag after cleaning things up
    * Won't work well with in-section warnings


Pros:

    * Less cruft for readers to deal with
    * Less confusion and upset when something is inappropriately tagged
    * Draws concerned parties into the talk page rather than arguing
      through templates


Another possibility that occurs to me. Could we do a little stylesheet 
and JavaScript magic to hide the specific warning templates unless 
people click on something in the {{notverygood}} box? That would let us 
keep them as part of the main article, but make them invisible to casual 
readers. Further magic would make them by default available to logged-in 
editors.

William